... the history of England.

If people would be fools, it was the business of a statesman to make use of their folly.

—Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, Chapter XXI.

... an impression, or possibly a comment.

Faith in the fixity of the soul, like the faith in the fixity of the earth, will not work out even as an ideal conception. (One may leave aside the question of it as a fact. As a fact we should be ready to accept it when it came, while still affirming, with the dying Thoreau: ‘One world at a time, if you please!’) It is not merely that to live a full and rich life in this wonderful world, among these fascinating beings, not even excluding human beings, and to fade away when—or better, before—one has exhausted all one’s power of living, should surely be a fate splendid enough for the greatest. What has always come home to me is that with the dissolution of the body the reasons for desiring the non-dissolution of the soul fall away. If I am to begin a new life, let me begin it washed clean from all my defects and errors and failures in this life, freed from the disillusioning results of all my accumulated memories. But so to begin a new life is to annihilate the old life. The new self would be a self that is not me: what has happened to me would mean nothing to it: what happens to it can mean nothing to me.

—Havelock Ellis, Impressions and Comments, 6 January 1920.

... some note-books.

We are all one animal, and death (which was at first voluntary, and has only come to be disliked because those who did not dislike it committed suicide too easily) and reproduction are only phases of the ordinary waste and repair which goes on in our bodies daily.

—Samuel Butler, The Note-books of Samuel Butler, 55.

... a sentence.

The poem demands the demise of the poet who writes it and the birth of the poet who reads it.

—Carole Maso, Ava, p. 65.