... a poem.

All night I spread portfolios
and pulled paintings down from racks ...
I showed him what he had made. It is not
enough, he told me, and he died.

—Robert Kelly, "The Death of Joseph Stella," November, 1946.

... a short story.

"I think how love is, is how to dance. It's hard, but you do it anyway. You practice and learn the positions for it. Bring me my crutches, lover dear, if you wouldn't mind, so I can dance love for you. Then you'll see all about it. It has to be shown and not talked of."

—Carol Emshwiller, "Emissary," from the collection The Start of The End of It All.

... a short story.

Mr. Bert Eon's nakedness reinforces the image of the robust health he enjoys. His body challenges the smooth nakedness of his wife and of his secretary. They are repelled and also terribly attracted to him. Kissing him is like chewing hairs ...

—Walter Abish, "Non-Site," from the collection Minds Meet, 1975.

... a short story.

Does anybody know what Art is or should be?

Do we try to redefine it every day of our lives?

Every other day?

Every now and then?

What will you give me if I succeed in redefining Art once and for all?

Well, then, must we do our Art without knowing any sure things about it?

Yes.

—Carol Emswhiller, "Joy in Our Cause," from the short story collection of the same title.

... a novel.

Her name was Diana Moon Glampers. No one had ever loved her. There was no reason why anyone should. She was ugly, stupid, and boring. On the rare occasions when she had to introduce herself, she always said her full name, and followed that with the mystifying equation that had thrust her into life so pointlessly:

"My mother was a Moon. My father was a Glampers."

—Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

... an essay.

The trouble with the interpreter is that he is too intelligent. He understands what the artist wants to say and even saves him the trouble of saying it—or at least of saying it in as pointed and polished a way as it could be said.

For it seems to me that, if the poet were left to himself, and not prematurely flattered by a few prigs, who happen to comprehend him before he is quite comprehensible, he might have worked in a harder and humbler fashion, until he had made his whole image really comprehensible and complete.

The poet's friends are so fantastically vain of having understood it when it was unfinished, that they rush about boasting of their understanding, that they may get the glory of it before other people can understand.

I do think it would be better if some really original poets of today went on pegging away, until their best effects were more like notes on a musical instrument and less like notes in a notebook.

—G. K. Chesterton, “The Middleman in Poetry”

... a pre-war travel book.

My friend and interpreter was there, but the president spoke enough English to make conversation very difficult.

—Evelyn Waugh, When The Going Was Good, "Globe-Trotting in 1930–1," p. 139 (of 298). A perfect sentence.

... a crappy afterword.

[The beginning and ending of The Great Gatsby are] lauded as examples of superb writing. Every word is filled with meaning and substance, laden with implication yet as light as ether; and when you reach out to grasp one, it slips through your fingers ...

Like a fairy-tale beanstalk, [Fitzgerald’s words] soar endlessly into the air, carrying the reader with them. Each word gives birth to the next in a single, ascending stream. Searching for space to grow, they spread out until they cover the sky ... Words are sucked upward with their ambiguities and multiple meanings intact, so that they bulge with implications and possibilities ...

[Readers] naturally apprehend what Fitzgerald is doing, for the writing is of unparalleled beauty, and the resonance of his language leaves nothing unsaid. This, I guess, is what literary genius is all about.

—Haruki Murakami, translator’s afterword to his The Great Gatsby, translated into English by Ted Goossen in In Translation: Translators on their work and what it means, Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky, eds.

Clearly, the worst writing being perpetrated in any language is that of blurb writing: highfalutin and utterly vacuous. (This being, in effect, an extended blurb intended for publication between the covers instead of on them.)

... a preface.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means preoccupation; and the preoccupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired. To people who are not overworked, holidays are a nuisance. A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

—George Bernard Shaw, "Parents and Children," preface to "Misalliance."

... a novel.

Now Cooper’s face, though it did not seem to move a muscle, brought together and threw off in a single grimace the finest shades of irresolution, revulsion, doglike devotion, catlike discretion, fatigue, hunger, thirst and reserves of strength, in a very small fraction of the time that the finest oratory would require for a greatly inferior evasion, and without exposing its proprietor to misquotation.

—Samuel Beckett, Murphy, chapter 10.

... the internet.

Rare Images of Angelina Jolie Being Auctioned Off.

—The internet. Ha, ha, ha.

... a ghost story.

"I love you," he says, crossing his fingers.

—Fay Weldon, "Watching Me, Watching You," from The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century Ghost Stories, edited by Michael Cox.

... a great essay.

We often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains.

There is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one's hat. Why should it be unpleasant to a well-ordered and pious mind? A man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardor and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal.

A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated. Let him think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification and repose.

I have known some people driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and they could not pull it out. "But if," I said, "you picture to yourself that you are pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle will become merely exciting and not exasperating. Imagine that you are roping up a fellow creature out of an Alpine crevasse. Imagine that you are engaged in a tug-of-war between French and English."

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

—G. K. Chesterton, "On Running After One's Hat," in All Things Considered, 1908.

... a novel.

"Take my advice, mister—" He stopped. To devise words of advice was going to tax his ability to the utmost. When would he learn not to plunge into the labyrinths of an opinion when he had not the slightest idea of how he was to emerge? His embarrassment was if possible increased by the expression of strained attention on Wylie's face, clamped there by the promise of advice.

"Yes, sergeant," said Wylie, and held his breath.

—Samuel Beckett, Murphy, chapter 4.

... a letter to the editors.

We live today in a world in which oligopolies (a few giant corporations which control the majority of the market) raise prices in good times and bad, prefer large per-item profits on a low volume of sales to smaller unit profits on many more sales, and shift the social costs of pollution, ecological disaster, poverty, unemployment, aging, and disability to everyone else—anyone else—in the name of "liberty."

This isn't liberty. It's piracy. Private piracy.

The liberty of the marketplace is, and historically has been, an excuse for the worst kind of vampirism. Despite the enormous inequities between men sanctioned by this version of "liberty," the inequities between men and women are worse: globally, women do two-thirds of the world's work and receive 10 percent of the world's pay.

—Joanna Russ, letter to The Women's Review of Books, March 1986. Collected in The Country You Have Never Seen.

... the history of England.

Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing-press alone excepted, those inventions which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species. Every improvement of the means of locomotion benefits mankind morally and intellectually as well as materially, and not only facilitates the interchange of the various productions of nature and art, but tends to remove national and provincial antipathies, and to bind together all the branches of the great human family.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, Volume 1, Chapter III.

... notebooks.

The greatest traveller has still covered but an infinitely small fraction of the world, and so with learning.

—Samuel Butler, Further Extracts from the Note-books of Samuel Butler, edited by A. T. Bartholomew, p. 257.

... a crappy preface to a crappy book.

[Keith Richards] tells the story of growing up on the Dartford Marshes in England among smallpox hospitals, leper colonies, and insane asylums. One day, another kid emerged out of the precipitous atmosphere, skinny with big lips ...

—Nicole Krauss, preface to Best European Fiction 2012, edited by Aleksandar Hemon.

"Precipitous atmosphere"? I don't know if Krauss thinks "precipitous" means "rainy" or what (does she mean Mick emerged out of "the clear blue sky," or possibly just "the rain"?). Even if it could be made to mean something (it can't), this would still be the worst kind of sesquipedalian bombast. A fitting introduction to a book full of stories that are either abominably translated, abominably written and translated with scrupulous fidelity, or (my guess) badly written and no better translated than they deserve.

The acknowledgements cite seventeen "cultural agencies and embassies" who made this book possible.

... part of a postmodern novel.

I know I am sounding less and less like myself. More like—quoi? a nouveau roman perhaps—a borrowed voice. Still one feels lucky to sound like anything at all. To be able to say anything, to feel anything.

—Carole Maso, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat.

... a book about death.

Without suspecting it, we are all living like somnambulists, performing the day's tasks mechanically, blindly, superficially, whether they are purely manual tasks which one could perform with one's eyes closed, or intellectual tasks which demand the most concentrated attention, the most unsleeping vigilance, the intensest application. Even when we grapple with a thought which we are striving to express, we feel, obscurely, that we are thinking of something else; something, we cannot say what, which seems to us far more important.

—Maurice Maeterlinck, Before the Great Silence, translated by Bernard Miall.

... a book.

The joyous task which confronts an ethics of spontaneity, however difficult it may be, is quite literally to woo people out of their armed shells.

—Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West, p. 186.

... an allegorical novel.

Property is robbery; but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organize our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organize our lust and our revenge.

—Samuel Butler, Erewhon, Chapter 12.

... a Stoic's meditation.

Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgement. In short, everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a warfare and a stranger's sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion.

—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II.17, translated by George Long.

... an introduction.

Although he returned home with less than five dollars' worth of gold, be brought back an inexhaustible wealth of experiences—experiences which his artistic genius would now transmute into marketable stories.

—Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, I. Milo Shepard, from the introduction to Short Stories of Jack London.

... a discourse.

What is the punishment of those who do not accept? It is to be what they are.

Is any person dissatisfied with being alone? Let him be alone. Is a man dissatisfied with his parents? Let him be a bad son, and lament. Is he dissatisfied with his children? Let him be a bad father.

"Cast him into prison." What prison? Where he is already, for he is there against his will; and where a man is against his will, there he is in prison.

—Epictetus, Discourses, I.12, translated by George Long.

... a book about capitalism vs. the climate.

We drive down wages, ship jobs overseas, destroy worker protections, hollow out local economies, then wonder why people can't afford to shop as much as they used to.

—Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, p. 166.

... a poem.

I'm sorry you had to die
To make me sorry
You're not here now.

—Kingsley Amis, "In Memoriam W.R.A.," from A Look Round the Estate.

... a big fat book.

The only serious global social movement, in all of history to date, has been the international labor movement (Marxism), which had one great, enduring, and legitimate strength—and one altogether fatal weakness. The strength was that it discovered a common trait that all humans possess, regardless of race, creed, nationality, or gender: we all have to secure our bodily survival through social labor of one sort or another. We all have to eat. And thus social labor puts us all in the same boat, makes us all world citizens.

Its fatal weakness was that it did not just ground higher cultural endeavors in the economic or material realm, it reduced them to that exchange, reduced them to material productions and material values and material means, with all higher productions, especially spirituality, serving only as the opiate of the masses.

This was such an egregious reduction that Marxism had to be converted into a religious mythology, and had to press its vision in an imperialistic fashion. But it took evolution less than a mere century to begin to erase that mistake in earnest.

—Ken Wilber, 199-200, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, 2000.

... a novel.

I kept the revolver in sight, just to remind him that all in the garden was not yet roses.

—Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male.

... an essay's footnote.

(1) Do not presume that the reader can read your mind—anything that you want the reader to visualize or consider or conclude, you must provide; (2) Do not presume that the reader feels the same way that you do about a given experience or issue—your argument cannot just assume as true the very things you're trying to argue for.

Because (1) and (2) seem so simple and obvious, it may surprise you to know that they are actually incredibly hard to get students to understand in such a way that the principles inform their writing. The reason for the difficulty is that, in the abstract, (1) and (2) are intellectual, whereas in practice they are more things of the spirit. The injunctions require of the student both the imagination to conceive of the reader as a separate human being and the empathy to realize that this separate person has preferences and confusions and beliefs of her own just as deserving of respectful consideration as the writer's. These sorts of requirements are, of course, also the elements of a Democratic Spirit. I therefore submit that the hoary cliché "Teaching the student to write is teaching the student to think" sells the enterprise way short. Thinking isn't even half of it.

—David Foster Wallace, "Authority and American Usage," footnote 59, collected in Consider the Lobster.

... a preface.

Man consists of the following properties of Matter; oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, kalium [potassium], natrium [sodium], sulphur, phosphorus, iron, magnesium, silicon, chlorine, fluorine, lithium, manganese, copper, lead. I invite the reader to consider this with all the material forces of his being.

These forms of Matter with their energies, of which the body, mind, and soul of man consist, have always been; they burn in the farthest stars, they are knit up in the texture—thinner than gossamer, than vapour, as im­ponderable as fancy—of the primitive substance, the Ether, which fills the interstellar spaces from moon to sun, from orbit to orbit, from galaxy to galaxy, the exquisite material out of which the nebulae are constringed in beads and drops and clots of Matter upon threads of light­ning, meteors, meteorites, that collide into flame, or by what process soever, to become upon con­densation, concentration, contraction, systems and constellations, suns and planets.

The whole Matter of man, however mutable, is therefore everlasting, has no beginning and will have no end; for Matter is indestructible.

—John Davidson, preface to The Theatrocrat: A Tragic Play of Church and Stage, 1905.

... a story.

Matthews's life had become so solitary he had almost stopped caring what he said, or to whom.

—Robert Stone, "Fun With Problems."

... an article.

Any decent writer sees his first concern as the rendering of what he takes to be permanent in human nature, and this holds true no matter how 'contemporary' his material. Now and again he may feel that there are some political causes too vast or urgent to be subordinated to mere literature, and will allow one or other such to determine the shape of what he writes. But by doing so he will have been guilty of betrayal. He will have accelerated the arrival of the day on which it is generally agreed that a novel or a poem or a play is no more than a system of generalizations orchestrated in terms of plot and diction and situation and the rest; the day, in other words, on which the novel, the poem, and the play cease to exist, and that is the worst prospect of all.

—Kingsley Amis, "Lone Voices," 1960, collected in What Became of Jane Austen?

... a short story.

At that moment experienced a strange elation, as if standing on a dock listening to water lap against piles as I prepared to embark on a longed-for voyage.

—Steven Millhauser, "The Wizard of West Orange."

... a Harper's from 2007, to tell the truth.

If you're going to write a book, who asked you to? It is, in fact, quite an act of ego to sit down in a room, while others are getting on trains and subways, and put one's vision on paper, and then ask others to pay to read it. It's an act of audacity.

—William Gaddis, from an interview by Tom LeClair, conducted in 1980 and included in the essay collection Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System.

To be honest, I feel some of the same audacity when blogging—which is why this blog is composed of other people's work.

... a French poem.

Of all the houses in the world
Only a balcony will remain
And of the human worldmap
A sadness without ceiling.
Of the late Atlantic Ocean
A little salt taste in the air,
A flying magical fish
Who will know nothing of the sea.

—Jules Supervielle, "Prophétie."

... a limerick.

A cento's a work that combines,
In some fashion, a number of lines
Other authors have penned.
It's an interesting blend
Of the output of literate minds.

—Chris Doyle, from The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form.

... a dictionary of English phrases.

Dutch Auction, A: a method of sale whereby the price of an article is successively reduced until a purchaser is forthcoming.

Dutch Bargain, A: (1) a one-sided bargain. From the couplet:— 'In matters of commerce the fault of the Dutch / Is giving too little and asking too much.'
(2) a bargain concluded by the parties drinking together.

Dutch Comfort: comfort derived from the knowledge that affairs might be worse than they are.

Dutch Concert, A: a great commotion and uproar, such as that made by a company of intoxicated Dutchmen.

Dutch Courage: physical courage induced by intoxication.

Dutch Feast, A: an entertainment at which the host gets drunk first.

Dutch Gleek: drinking. Gleek is an old game. The suggestion is that the favorite game of the Dutch is drinking.

Dutch Nightingales: frogs.

Dutch, To beat the: to make a statement apparently incredible.

Dutch Uncle, To talk like a: to reprove sharply. The Dutch were reputed to exercise severe discipline.

—Albert M. Hyamson, in A Dictionary of English Phrases. And the Oxford English Dictionary has this to add: "Dutch wife: a bolster used for resting the legs in bed."

... a preface.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

And the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. This alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist.

—George Bernard Shaw, preface to Man and Superman.

... a writer on writing.

It is only because the world looks on his talent with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to make his talent important.

—James Baldwin, source unknown.

... another French novel.

We led him back upstairs and out into the air. It was two in the morning. Not a cat.

—Marcel Aymé, Les tiroirs de l'inconnu, p. 65 of 279.

... a French novel very slowly.

The Public Prosecutor and his Deputies, worn out with fatigue, feverish with brandy and lack of sleep, could only shake off their exhaustion with a violent effort; and their shattered health made them tragic figures.

—Anatole France, The Gods are Thirsty.

... the Tao Te Ching adapted for a new age.

When a person forgets that all creation is a unity, allegiance goes to lesser wholes, such as the family, the home team, or the company.

As consciousness of unity is lost, nationalism, racism, classism, and sexism arise. People take sides, and favor this versus that.

—John Heider, The Tao of Leadership, p. 35

... a French novel very slowly.

Amid the stream of citizens that flowed past the shop, it was the most ragged who loitered longest before the two beautiful windows, eager for distraction, hungry for images, and wanting to take their share, if only by eye, of the good things in life; they stood in open-mouthed admiration, while the aristocrats merely glanced, frowned, and passed on.

—Anatole France, The Gods are Thirsty, Chapter 3.

... a divertimento.

We all talk about the history of literature, but what, concretely, is the history of literature in the common memory? A patchwork of fragmentary images that, by pure chance, each of thousands of readers has stitched together for himself. Beneath the hole-ridden sky of such a vaporous, illusory memory, we are all at the mercy of blacklists, of their arbitrary, untestable verdicts, and always ready to ape their stupid elegance.

—Milan Kundera, "Blacklists, or Divertimento in Homage to Anatole France," in Encounter.

... a short story.

During many years of married life he had forgotten what sex was really about.

—Richard Brautigan, "Wild Birds of Heaven," from Revenge of the Lawn.

... a #1 national bestseller.

An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological, or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency, and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines. Our common addiction to dirty, non-renewable energy sources keeps other kinds of emergencies coming: natural disasters and wars waged for control over scarce resources, which in turn create terrorist blowback.

Given the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political, future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies. All indications are that simply by staying the current course, they will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity. Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market's invisible hand. This is one area in which it actually delivers.

—Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, p. 513.

... a sentence in a novel.

Dr Vaisey had put his cake in some danger without so much as having nibbled at it.

—Kingsley Amis, The Russian Girl, p. 51.

... a piece of trash.

I feel the inexorable gravity of the entity's psychokinetic grasp tugging at my guts and howling at my mind.

—by a trashy novelist who will go unnamed. I love that it's the grasp's gravity that howls (!!??).

Whenever I feel bad about my own day's writing, it pays to read trash.

... a blank-verse play.

How brisk am I! My body moves on springs! My stature gives no inch I throw away; my supple joints play free and sportfully; I’m every atom what a man should be.

—Sir William Fondlove, in James Sheridan Knowles’s The Love-Chase, Act V.

... a euphemism.

He waved the glass of water away, and me, and sat back in that yellow armchair, and he simply died. The silence in my husband's ear was never more to be broken.

—Christine Brooke-Rose, Textermination, p. 81.

... an erotic tale.

"I would like, for my entire life, to be within the walls of a prison, where only you and I would be, where we are united so thoroughly and you are hidden in my arms so well, that not one eye would suspect you were there. I would like to be the fruit that you eat, the fragrance that gives you pleasure, the sleep that enters under your eyelids, the love that enlivens your body." ...

The wind intermingled their hair.

—Pierre Louÿs, Aphrodite, chapter 6. Translated by Mary Hanson Harrison.

... most of a paragraph.

From its stationary position, Mr Norfolk's car began slowly to move and Gerald could discern the bent figures of the boys [pushing] at the back of it, trying against inertia and gradient to get up a reasonable speed. Mr Norfolk himself sat motionless, hands on steering wheel, with a detached yet anxious expression, as of an artist showing his creations to an important critic.

—Roy Fuller, The Ruined Boys, p. 136.

... a speech from a play.

Galileo: Yes, I am dissatisfied, and that's what you'd be paying me for if you had any brains. Because I'm dissatisfied with myself. But instead of doing that you force me to be dissatisfied with you.

—Bertolt Brecht, Life of Galileo, Scene 1. Galileo is complaining to the university procurator that they don't pay him enough, so he has to waste his precious time teaching to make ends meet, instead of solving the mysteries of the universe.

Sounds like the dilemma of every writer!

... a paragraph.

We were driving from New York City up the Saw Mill Parkway toward the Taconic and listening to the Wanderer Symphony of Schubert on the radio. I begged you to slow down, but as slowly as you drove, we were still losing it in the static, long before it finished.

—Carole Maso, Ava, p. 7. A perfect short short story contained in this lovely, fragmentary novel.

... a sentence.

I felt the beautiful tree come alive as the wind swept through it; then I wrapped my legs even tighter and pressed my open lips on to the hairy nape of a branch.

—Pierre Louÿs, The Songs of Bilitis.

... an article.

It was in the hope that we should remain in some respects unlike that Nature made so many of us and put us up in separate packages. Yet for one man who expresses his own taste we have a hundred missionaries to other people's.

—Frank Moore Colby, "Conventional Plays."

... a sample voice.

I want to talk to you 'bout bumpin' your head. You're still bumpin' your head, son, against the wall, 'fore you go to sleep. I don't like it. You're too old to do that. It disturbs me. I can hear you in there, when you go to bed, bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump. It's disturbing. It's monotonous. It's a very disturbing sound. I don't like it. I don't like listenin' to it. I want you to stop it. I want you to get ahold of yourself. I don't like to hear that noise when I'm sittin' in here tryin' to read the paper or whatever I'm doin', I don't like to hear it and it bothers your mother. It gets her all upset and I don't like your mother to be all upset, just on accounta you. Bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump bump, what are you, kid, some kind of animal? I cain't figure you out, kid. I just flat cain't understand it, bump bump bump bump bump bump bump. Dudden't hurtcha? Dudden't hurtcha head?

—Donald Barthelme, Sample Voice C, from A Manual for Sons, from The Dead Father, p. 128-9.

... the thesaurus.

Why? wherefore? whence? how comes it? how is it? how happens it? how does it happen?

In some way, somehow, somehow or other; in some such way.

—New Roget's Thesaurus, 1989, section 155. Found poetry!

... a sentence.

In resolving to do our work well is the only sound foundation of any religion whatsoever: and by that resolution only, and what we have done, and not by our belief, Christ will judge us.

—John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, Letter 76.

... a spam email.

Forgive my indignation if this message comes to you as a surprise ...

—"Mohamed Mohama," of the "Economic Community of West African States."

How dare he be indignant at my surprise? Should I have been expecting his email?

... a sentence fragment.

Flapdoodle to feed fools on.

—James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 161.

... a couple lines from what's not a novel.

Nancy Barron, a madwoman at the poorhouse farm in Concord.

Immortalized because Emerson could hear her endless screaming from his study.

—David Markson, This Is Not a Novel, p. 66.

... a sentence.

Like some Zen goddess, I observe human frailty and foibles, all that is useless or stupid, with affection.

—Carole Maso, in The Room Lit by Roses, a journal of pregnancy and birth. There are lots of good lines in this book.

... a footnote.

I am indebted for this phrase to the 9,000-odd writers who have used it before me.

—Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, p. 240, footnote. The phrase is "he looks at her as if seeing her for the first time." (And then "the scene mercifully fades before my eyes." Two asterisks leading to the same footnote!)

... a paragraph.

Prudence and William had left an inflated india-rubber sea-serpent behind them in the bathroom. Sir Samson sat in the warm water engrossed with it. He swished it down the water and caught it in his toes; he made waves for it; he blew it along; he sat on it and let it shoot up suddenly to the surface between his thighs; he squeezed some air out of it and made bubbles. Chance treats of this kind made or marred the happiness of his day. Soon he was rapt in daydream about the pleistocene age, where among mists and vast unpeopled crags schools of deep-sea monsters splashed and sported ...

—Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief, p. 62 of 238.

... a line from a play.

I could have breakfasted out of her knickers so sweetly pure she was ...

—Steven Berkoff, from a play called East.

... a metaphor.

The air in our lungs is "the forked root" of the sky.

—The Erl King by Michel Tournier, p. 65.

... a joke.

A man goes into an Italian cobbler's shop with a pair of shoes to be heeled. He makes it clear that he must have the shoes that same evening, and that if the cobbler can't do the job, he won't leave the shoes. The cobbler swears that the shoes will be ready.

That evening, the man returns to find that the shoes are not ready, and, exasperated, he asks the cobbler why he swore to him that they would be.

The cobbler replies: "Telling you that they'd be ready, even when I knew they wouldn't, made you happy all day."

—"Genetic Coding," by Gilbert Sorrentino, from Something Said.

... a long sentence.

In God's eyes the differences of social position, of intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of fortitude and goodness we can summon up.

—"What Makes a Life Significant?", by William James.

... a sentence.

You remember how father would trust strangers, and if they fooled him he would say, "It's better to be fooled than to be suspicious"—that the confidence trick is the work of man, but the want-of-confidence trick is the work of the devil.

—Howards End, E. M. Forster, p. 41 (of 319).

... a newspaper article.

Efforts to remove "squaw" [from maps and official place names] can draw bewildered reactions from white people, who say they had no idea that Indians objected to it. Some Native Americans do not take offense at the word, but many do, and some consider it so ugly that they call it "the s-word."

English speakers have used the term for almost 400 years, starting in what is now the Northeastern United States. Linguists say it probably derives from terms for woman in Algonquin languages, but Indians often contend that it comes from a word for vagina. (Sometimes, the vulgarity is beyond debate; there are summits called Squaw Teat or derivations of that.)

—New York Times National Edition, March 29th, p. 14.

I also don't find the word offensive (I don't find anything offensive), but I think we have to take other people's word for it when they say they do find something offensive.

What I found amusing was the claim that a word, if derived from "vagina," is therefore vulgar. If the word "lady" were proved to derive from "vagina," would we therefore find it offensive to call a lady "lady"? Are vaginas offensive?

Also, I think it's funny that a mountain—Squaw Teat—might have been named, in effect, "Pussy Boob," or "Vagina Tit."

... part of a poem.

A single tree with sinuous trunk, boughs exquisitely wreathed, grew there; an ash which Winter for himself decked out with pride, and with outlandish grace: up from the ground, and almost to the top, the trunk and every master branch were green with clustering ivy, and the lightsome twigs and outer spray profusely tipped with seeds that hung in yellow tassels, while the air stirred them, not voiceless.

Often have I stood foot-bound uplooking at this lovely tree beneath a frosty moon.

The hemisphere of magic fiction, verse of mine perchance may never tread; but scarcely Spenser's self could have more tranquil visions in his youth, or could more bright appearances create of human forms with superhuman powers, than I beheld, loitering on calm clear nights alone, beneath this fairy work of earth.

—from Book Six of The Prelude by William Wordsworth. I love that word, "foot-bound."

... a phrase.

... that vapor-bath of hurried and discontented humanity ...

—describing a subway car, in News From Nowhere, by William Morris, p. 1.

... a footnote.

For the record, I’d like to live in an America in which I could leave my door unlocked all the time; in which I could walk wherever I wanted at night; in which we all took each other on faith; in which there were fewer people and more trees, a wild America like Canada; an America in which I could believe what the President said; in which women’s bodies were their own business; in which electrical power consumption diminished every year, in which automobiles were banned from our cities and televisions and chain stores were banned everywhere; in which knowingly failing to help a stranger in an emergency would be punished by death, in which people collected experiences instead of things; in which everyone died at home, not in a hospital, in which everything was sexual and nothing was pornographic, in which beautiful words were second in importance only to beautiful deeds and beautiful souls, in which we all made use of what we already had.

—Rising Up and Rising Down by William T. Vollmann, vol. 1, p. 311, note 99.

... a paragraph.

We will try to take some small piece of English ground, beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no steam-engines upon it, and no railroads; we will have no untended or unthought-of creatures on it; none wretched, but the sick; none idle but the dead. We will have no liberty upon it; but instant obedience to known law, and appointed persons: no equality upon it; but recognition of every betterness that we can find, and reprobation of every worseness. When we want to go anywhere, we will go there quietly and safely, not at forty miles an hour in the risk of our lives; when we want to carry anything anywhere, we will carry it either on the backs of beasts, or on our own, or in carts, or boats; we will have plenty of flowers and vegetables in our gardens, plenty of corn and grass in our fields,—and few bricks. We will have some music and poetry; the children shall learn to dance to it and sing it;—perhaps some of the old people, in time, may also.

—Fors Clavigera by John Ruskin, Letter 5.