Sedulia's Quotations

William J. Mann on the era of Katherine Hepburn: "Even common farm women wanted to be classy."

That was a different era then. Even common farm women wanted to be classy. Today everyone wants to be unclassy-- people show up in restaurants in major cities looking like hell.

  --Robert Osborne [correction], quoted by Christy Lemire in an article on William J. Mann, author of a biography on Katharine Hepburn, AP, Los Angeles Times, 11 May 2007

Kate Webb: Viet Cong says French tougher foes than Americans

[Kate Webb was an Australian reporter held by the Viet Cong in 1971 for a month.]

...a war-scarred Viet Cong translator who had spent half his life in the resistance reacted when she asked him who was the more formidable foe-- the French colonialists or the Americans?

The translator told her, unequivocally, that fighting the French had been far tougher, that they were better soldiers and knew more about the country than the Americans....

When she was released May 1, she was 22 pounds lighter and sick with two strains of malaria.

"People always think I must be so tough to survive all this," she said several years ago. "But I'm a real softie. But maybe that's what it takes-- you have to be soft to survive. Hard people shatter."

 

    --Obituary of Kate Webb by Elaine Woo in the Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2007

Gibbon and Oxford on literary prejudice

Still preserving the prejudices after they had lost the virtues of their ancestors, they affected to despise the unpolished manners of the Roman conquerors, while they were compelled to respect their superior wisdom and power.

[Footnote.] There is not, I believe, from Dionysus to Libanus, a single Greek critic who mentions Virgil or Horace. They seem ignorant that the Romans had any good writers.

  --Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-1788), Vol. 1, ch. II.

[Footnote.] An attitude alive and well today in that former empire, Britain. For example, The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Christopher Ricks, excludes all English verse not written in the U.K. --"for he IS an EnglishMAN!" with the curious exception of Irish writers, even though Ireland has been a free country for 80 years, and not coincidentally, has finally become prosperous.

You vulgar colonials need not apply.

Defense Secretary Gates sees no light at the end of the tunnel

Senator Arlen Spector (R-PA), questioning Robert Gates, U.S. Secretary of Defense, yesterday on further funding for the war in Iraq, which has now lasted longer than America's participation in World War II, and is costing 90 billion dollars a year:

What are the prospects of a light at the end of the tunnel?

Robert Gates:

Well, I think the honest answer, Senator, is that I don't know.

  --Exchange heard on National Public Radio, 8 May 2007

Edward Gibbon on the Roman destruction of Seleucia, its own ally

The sack and conflagration of Seleucia, with the massacre of three hundred thousand of the inhabitants, tarnished the glory of the Roman triumph [over enemy city, Ctesiphon,  just across the Tigris river].

    --Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (published 1776-1788), Vol. 1, ch. VIII. At the time, Seleucia was one of the world's largest cities, and an ally of Rome.

What woman wants, God wants

Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut.

What woman wants, God wants.

     --French proverb

Truman Capote's "party of the century": starlet falls for doorman

[Truman Capote gave] an intimate dance for 540 at the Plaza Hotel....His friends included movie stars, politicians, journalists, socialites, writers, moguls, foreign dignitaries, a dusting of Kansas lawmen (and their wives) whom he had befriended while writing In Cold Blood, and a brawny doorman, who danced the night away with a starlet who didn't suspect his humble provenance. Ms Davis writes, 'Truman did not have the heart to tell her she had fallen under the spell of his elevator man.'"

    --Liesl Schilliger in a review of Deborah Davis's book Party of the Century in The New York Times,  19 March 2006

Ray Bradbury's solution to the Middle East impasse

His solution to the Middle East impasse sounds like science fiction: create a new Jewish homeland in south Florida. "People think I'm joking when I say that," Mr Bradbury said.

           --Ray Bradbury,  quoted in an article on Fahrenheit 451 by Rob Kendt, The New York Times, 19 March 2006

Munich is happy as the enemy marches in

On April 30, 1945, as units of the 7th American army prepared to take Munich, the "Hauptstadt der Bewegung" ["capital of the movement" of Naziism, and Hitler's favorite city], a ghostly land of ruins awaited them, in which almost all human life seemed to have died out. Already since the day before traffic had fallen silent in the rubble-filled streets of the outer areas, which in the center of Munich had been worn into narrow paths through mountains of looming building façades; a tense, paralyzing silence, interrupted only through the thunder of guns, told of the arrival of the victors....

The Munich population still bore the burden of the years of bombing, but the marching in of the enemy was still an occasion for joy: for the city, the Second World War was over.

--From Ruinen-Jahren: Bilder aus dem zerstörten München 1945-1949 [Pictures of Munich destroyed] (1983), by Richard Bauer.

Better to be a fool with everyone than wise all alone

Il vaut mieux être fou avec tous que sage tout seul.

Better to be a fool with everyone than wise all alone.

         --French proverb