"Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it; you may be sure that the highest moment of his happiness was, perhaps, exactly three days before the discovery of the New World. Columbus died having seen very little of it and in fact not knowing what he had discovered. The point is in life, in life alone—in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself!"

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

"But I like looking at that painting," Rogozhin muttered after a silence, as if again forgetting his question.

"At that painting!" the prince suddenly cried out, under the impression of an unexpected thought. "At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!"

"Lose it he does," Rogozhin suddenly agreed unexpectedly.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

There is no doubt that her family sufferings were groundless, had negligible cause, and were ridiculously exaggerated; but if you have a wart on your nose or forehead, it seems to you that all anyone in the world does and has ever done is to look at your wart, laugh at it, and denounce you for it, though for all that you may have discovered America.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

"So what if it is an illness?" he finally decided. "Who cares that it's an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?"

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

Looking around for a publisher, Looney found one who offered to pay him a substantial sum but only on condition that he adopted a pseudonym. Such a heretical theory could not possibly be put forward under the unfortunate name of Looney.

—Elizabeth Winkler, Shakespeare was a Woman and Other Heresies

The answer was surprising. The impediment to family faith was, in a word, men. They balked. Here were the common refrains: "Churches are always asking for money." "Church services are boring, predictable, routine, and irrelevant." "All you do is stand up and sit down." "I don't like being shamed." When he could speak just to men, he really found out the secret: men don't like being religious in public. It's not that they are not eager for the epiphanic experience; it's that they prefer it not to be displayed. Promise Keepers, the fundamentalist Christian group that fills football stadiums with men, has been hectored for its sexist policy, but it has understood male reticence. In the company of women, men don't want to be told to sing, to say stuff, or to give anything. They don't like losing control. They like the sense of voluntary activity, of doing something, of questing, exploring the edge on their own.

—James B. Twitchell, Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld

He pushed himself back into the plastic chair. This chair, the guest chair, was tilted slightly forward and waxed, so that the sitter could maintain his seat in it only through a constant bracing effort of the legs. The weaker the legs, the shorter the visit.

—Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

"Can you give us some idea of what all that means, Mr. Popper?"

"It doesn't mean much of anything in a surface reading like that."

"That's what I would have said too. So much sawdust. I'm surprised to hear you admit it."

"I acknowledge it freely enough. A lot of that is just filler material in the oracular mode to put P.S. off the scent."

"P.S.?"

"Perfect Strangers. Those who are not Gnomons. Others, outsiders. P.S. or A.M. Perfect Strangers or the Ape Men."

"But to what purpose? Apes we may be, but why throw dust in our eyes? Can you explain?"

"Sure can. I thought it would be obvious. We do it to protect our secret knowledge. We don't know whose hands those books might fall into, Senator, and so we are obliged to put a lot of matter in there to weary and disgust the reader. The casual reader is put off at once. A page or two of that and the ordinary man is a limp rag. Even great scholars, men who are trained and well paid to read dull books, are soon beaten down by it."

—Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis

"He sits around in his room with the door locked and does lines and listens to this song by the Buffalo Springfield, over and over . . . you know that one? 'Something's happening here . . . what it is ain't exactly clear . . . .' It's weird. People get upset, all of a sudden they want to listen to old hippie garbage they would never listen to if they were in their right mind, when my cat died I had to go out and borrow all these Simon and Garfunkel records."

—Donna Tartt, The Secret History (ellipses in original)

Vivien found the dress at Vince, across from her hotel at Madison and Seventy-Sixth. It was a simple shift, deliriously soft and just the right length, as in a bit too short but seemingly accidentally so, as if she were a touch taller and thinner than the intended model. It was effortless without being sloppy, editorial but in no way dressed up. With her low-tops and denim jacket, it would hit the right note, showing her off without her showing off. If the dress had come only in black, or only in navy, she wouold have gladly, almost thoughtlessly, purchased either. But unfortunately it came in both. She spent over half an hour in the dressing room switching between them, examining herself, posing, evaluating the implications, agonizing over the decision. It was amazing how the same dress in only slightly different colors could seem so different. But then again, nothing highlights difference quite like homogeneity. The black was so stark, so purely minimal. Very now, very New York. The navy would have seemed the same in isolation, but by contrast it almost felt like a grown-up version of something she might have worn at Penn or even Sill. Comparatively, it paid homage to prep without being preppy, developing a latent infusion of nostalgia and youth. She wanted to prefer the black. Reason told her to go for the black. In a movie, she'd definitely wear a black dress. But viscerally, physically, she felt lighter, looked younger in the navy. It made her feel how she wanted to feel in the black. Even if she bought both, she could wear only one. Vivien had to choose.

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

Of all the dangers in life, there is perhaps none more treacherous than getting precisely what you want. As it has been said, the mistakes we male and female mortals make when we have our own way persist in raising wonder at our fondness of it.

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

 Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.

—Paul Valéry, quoted in Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

What advertising does, and how it does it, has little to do with the movement of specific goods. Like religion, which has little to do with the actual delivery of salvation in the next world but everything to do with the ordering of life in this one, commercial speech has little to do with material objects per se but everything to do with how we perceive them.

—James B. Twitchell, Adcult: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture

A small New York agency recently hired personable actors to go into swanky watering holes like the Royalton, Cafe Tabac, and Bloom and ask for a martini made with Hennessy cognac rather than the usual gin or vodka. When the barkeep said that he had never heard of such a drink, the actors would explain in loud detail exactly what brands to use. J&B Scotch would hire beautiful women to walk into bars, order J&B, and grandly turn on their heel if there wasn't any.

—James B. Twitchell, Adcult: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture

I have often noticed in the United States that it is not easy to make a man understand that his presence may be dispensed with; hints will not always suffice to shake him off. I contradict an American at every word he says, to show him that his conversation bores me; he instantly labors with fresh pertinacity to convince me; I preserve a dogged silence, and he thinks I am meditating deeply on the truths that he is uttering; at last I rush from his company, and he supposes that some urgent business hurries me elsewhere. The man will never understand that he wearies me to death unless I tell him so, and the only way to get rid of him is to make him my enemy for life.

 —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

While at Florence, Berlioz relates in his Memoirs, he received a letter from the mother of Camille, the woman he loved, informing him of Camille's marriage to another. "In two minutes my plans were laid. I must hurry to Paris to kill two guilty women and one innocent man; for, this act of justice done, I too must die." Accordingly he loads his pistols, supplies himself with a disguise as a lady's maid, so as to be able to penetrate into the guilty household, and puts into his pockets "two little bottles, one of strychnine, the other of laudanum." While awaiting the departure of the diligence he "rages up and down the streets of Florence like a mad dog." Later, as the diligence is traversing a wild mountain road, he suddenly lets out a "'Ha!' so hoarse, so savage, so diabolic that the startled driver bounded aside as if he had indeed a demon for his fellow-traveller." But on reaching Nice he is so enchanted by the climate and environment that he not only forgets his errand, but spends there "the twenty happiest days" of his life! There are times, one must admit, when it is an advantage to be temperamental.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

In case of doubt the neo-classicist is always ready to sacrifice fancy to the "substantial, useful part," and so he seems too negative and cool and prosaic in his reason, and this is because his reason is so largely a protest against a previous romantic excess. What had been considered genius in the time of the "metaphysicals" had too often turned out to be only oddity. With this warning before them men kept their eyes fixed very closely on the model of normal human nature that had been set up, and imitated it very literally and timorously. A man was haunted by the fear that he might be "monstrous," and so, as Rymer put it, "satisfy nobody's maggot but his own." Correctness thus became a sort of tyranny. We suffer to the present day from this neo-classical failure to work out a sound conception of the imagination in its relation to good sense. Because the neo-classicist held the imagination lightly as compared with good sense the romantic rebels were led to hold good sense lightly as compared with imagination. The romantic view in short is too much the neo-classical view turned upside down; and, as Sainte-Beuve says, nothing resembles a hollow so much as a swelling.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

The man who plants himself, not on outer authority but on experience, is an individualist. To be modern in the sense I have defined is not only to be positive and critical, but also—and this from the time of Petrarch—to be individualistic. The establishment of a sound type of individualism is indeed the specifically modern problem.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

From the time of his arrival in 1631 until his death in 1676, his library was freely used by neighbors and friends. One of these, Jonathan Brewster, read so many books on alchemy that his mind became muddled.

—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier

The more you limit yourself, the more resourceful you become.

—Søren Keirkegaard, Either / Or