Sedulia's Quotations

Jules Renard on literary criticism

Analyze a book! What would you say about a guest who, after eating a ripe peach, took the morsels out of his mouth to look at them?

       --French writer Jules Renard (1864-1910) in his diary, 15 March 1892

Analyser un livre! Que dirait-on d'un convive qui, mangeant une pêche mûre, en retirerait les morceaux de sa bouche pour voir?

Mary Lou Jepsen on hormone levels of a young man: I was angry all the time

I was angry all the time. I thought about sex all the time. I thought I was the smartest person in the entire world. It gave me a new appreciation for men.

  --Engineer Mary Lou Jepsen, in 2013, in a TED talk. She had had a brain operation and needed hormone therapy, and was experimenting with hormone levels "typical of a man in his early 20s."

Garry Wills: the South avenges itself

American politics is the South's revenge for the Civil War.

  --Garry Wills, in 1975, quoted by Sam Tanenhaus in "Original Sin: Why the GOP is and will continue to be the party of white people", in the New Republic, February 2013.

The illustration is from "The Cavalry Fight at Brandy Station" [Virginia] in Three Years in the Federal Cavalry (1870), by Willard Glazier.