Sedulia's Quotations

De Quincey: Children look with more searching gaze than adults

Into all the elementary feelings of man, children look with more searching gaze than adults.

  --Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) in Suspiria de Profundis (1845)

The Abbé Grégoire finds out France is not French

In 1790, the Abbé Grégoire sent out a questionnaire asking which languages people spoke [in the French countryside]. The answers he received (at any rate those he could understand) were alarming. Large parts of France "were barely French at all": two hundred and fifty years after the Ordinances of Villers-Cotterêts, which had made the dialect of Paris and the Île-de-France the language of official documents, six million citizens still couldn't speak the national language.

    --Michael Sheringham in a review of The Discovery of France, by Graham Robb. Review in the London Review of Books, 31 July 2008

Jean Baudrillard: Los Angeles no longer real

In fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real.

  --Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), quoted in his obituary in the U.K. Telegraph, 8 March 2007