“when I opened the door [into his own office] and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever. The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.”
Raymond Chandler The Little Sister
“Nose to the grindstone, eyes on the hills.”
Peter F. Drucker Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
C.S. Lewis, quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts
“paring knives that were duller than a throne speech…”
Bruce Ward in Ottawa Citizen December 27, 2002
“You have not come back from hell with empty hands.”
A handwritten note from André Malraux to Whittaker Chambers about his book Witness, quoted by William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review August 6, 2001 (adding “I remembered the gratitude Chambers felt” on receiving it.
“Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation.”
Charles Mackay Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
In my latest National Post column I say the enduring, stomach-churning, decades-long futility of the Toronto Maple Leafs furnishes valuable lessons on how not to succeed in all sorts of areas of life including public policy… if only we could figure out what their secret is.
“University of Hawaii researcher Lou Herman ‘has proved that dolphins are capable of complex problem solving, demonstrating prodigious feats of learning, memory and creativity,’ reports Reader’s Digest. ‘One well-known anecdote involves a clever aquarium dolphin who was rewarded by his trainers for retrieving one piece of garbage after another. It turns out that, in order to maximize his fishy rewards, the dolphin had stashed an entire newspaper at the bottom of the tank and was tearing off one small piece at a time.’”
“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 12, 2012