“Frederick Myers describes a conversation with her [George Eliot] in which, ‘taking as her text the words God, Immortality, Duty, she pronounced, with a terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how incredible the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’…. It is quite normal now for people to go through life without an ultimate object, but to the Victorians it was new and daunting. No wonder so many of them were such odd fish – Kitchener, Rosebery, Salisbury, Dilke, Curzon, Carson, Randolph Churchill, Fisher, Rhodes, Milner. In many cases certitude was replaced by a streak of violence…”
Paul Johnson The Offshore Islanders
“You’re gonna miss the bus! Rise and shine, chia head!”/ “The wise crack of dawn.”
Two characters in the comic strip Grand Avenue in Ottawa Citizen April 7, 2003
“One general description of madness, it seems to us, might be found in the statement that madness is a preference for the symbol over that which it represents.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Lunacy and Letters,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“Each man may have a glass to see things past whereby he may judge justly of things present, and wisely of things to come.”
Grafton’s Chronicle (1569), quoted in Robin Neillands, The Wars of the Roses