dennis scharnberg

We always lack crucial information.

Desmond Urquhart, The Unsocial Sciences.

He wants a curl

Just like the curl

That harried dear old Dad

Clyde Burbage, ed., Letters from James Joyce.

“You have to watch out with that, Cassandra, or it will get you.”

“And what, exactly, is it that will get me?”

“The past.”

Benedict Elder, A Cosmopolitan Paradise.

The lie in genealogies is that the time indicator is satisfied by month, day, and year. But the birth—like the conception—is down to exact seconds. Genealogies are crystalline.

Amanda Willcoxen, ed., The Literary and Philosophical Fragments of Gregory James Sallust.

“It’s that personal myth. And we all have one, Paula. In one form or another.”

Haskell Wexler, Paradise, the Novel.

To them, apparently, it seems as though it will be extensive. Or even infinite. But it always turns out to be miserably finite.

Winston Artura, A Murder in the Tulip Garden.

Only by constant efforts do we impede annihilation.

Hannah Hooke, The Hildebrandt Method.

“One can waste one’s time in worse ways, certainly.” That’s how Mr. Devlin stated it. Crisply, and in those very words.

Victoria Salt, A Compendium of Opening Lines.

A book needs to be about everything.

Godfrey Tooke, Collected Aphorisms.

In [Ockeghem’s] Missa Prolationem, when the first “hosanna” comes, it is as though everything else in the world stops.

Allison Twilley, The Fondo d’Oro.