Hal Johnson's Blog, page 29

A garland of quotations XXXIX

What gleamed on the waves?
Blood gleamed on the waves.
•Friedrich Kreutzwald, Kalevipoeg (1862).

He poisoned the blade and struck home, the full bosom receiving
The wound and the venom in one, past cure or relieving.

He made treaty with Time to stand still that the grief might be fresh—
•Kipling, “Late Came the God” (1926)

As Sufaid Dev bent to pick up another rock, Amir dealt him a blow of his sword from behind, carving through his skull and slicing his spine. Sufaid Dev fell on his face and cried, “S...

A garland of quotations XXXVIII

For grownups

For kids

For anyone, I guess

For, let me tell you in passing, I find it very useful, especially when one is travelling, to look about one occasionally.
•Rudolf Erich Raspe, Baron Münchausen (1785).

But the mechanics weren’t the worst of my problems—I also had to contend with the spirit world.
•U Sam Oeur, Crossing Three Wildernesses (2005).

To drift is not surrender.
The backwards call of a bird
is the sound of another bird.
•Yanyi, “Migrants” (2022).

It is possible to persuade lions and leopa...

Notes towards an Understanding of Daniel Clowes’s Monica

(A Garland of Quotations has moved to Wednesday, perhaps permanently, as an experiment. As always, I encourage you, if you like my writing but wish an editor would “tone it down,” to indulge in some of my books, in which a sober editor has done just that.)

I love Daniel Clowes’s new graphic novel Monica, but I don’t understand all of it. In part, this is because I’ve only had a week or two with the book, and in part because some aspects may be literally ununderstandable. Clowes is on record (spea...

Twenty short pieces

[Please do not neglect to check out my innumerable books (a hyperbole; there are seven), which alone justify my continued existence.]

If you don’t peel the orange yourself, you don’t get the good-smelling fingers. A parable.

*

Orwell once said “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever.” This is perceptive, as far as it goes, but Orwell failed to note that the boot and the face would belong to the same person.

*

In 1956, J. Edgar Hoover called rock’n’roll “...

A garland of quotations XXXVII

Preorder Apprentice Academy: Knights!

Certain books are apparently written not so that we may learn from them, but to demonstrate the fact that the author knew something.
•Goethe, “Own and Adopted Ideas in Proverbial Formulation” (1821).

A cage went in search of a bird.
•Kafka, Zurau Aphoirisms (1917–18).

Legend tells that a giant has been chained to the summit of snowy Elbruz. for committing sins of some sort. When he awakens, he asks his guards, “Are rushes still growing on the earth? Are lambs sti...

A garland of quotations XXXVI

(If you find these quotes compelling, please check out my more conventional prose narratives, such as blog-namesake alternate history collection Impossible Histories , kid-friendly edumicational wizard school guide book (and guide to sorcerers of myth and legend) Apprentice Academy: Sorcerers , or highbrow/lowbrow novel Sudden Glory , all released this past year.)

Not a single great ruler in history can be absolved by a judge who fixes his eye inexorably on one or two unjustifiable acts. Bruce the d...

A garland of quotations XXXV

Preorder Apprentice Academy: Knights!

All the Chinese bandits having chopped off all the foreign ears, we have time not only to consider the subject Atrocity, but the subject Bandits, and the subject Missionaries, and the subject Foreigners, and the subject Chinese. All politicians who are going to be elected have been elected; and all the artificial excitement in events which no one really regards as either very important or very interesting has been exhausted. All the historical events have hap...

A garland of quotations XXXIV

Preorder Apprentice Academy: Knights!

The loon cares not for pond, nor wolf for lamb, Nor dogs for hare, or captured beast escape,Nor does the fish crave water, hawks the lark, As much as wounded hearts desire revenge.•Nigellus Wireker, The Mirror of Fools (ca. 1180)

I sometimes think a humming-bird leaves his trail in the air.
•Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826).

Even as a child, before I knew despair
I guessed my soul would rest upon the sea
Like a night bird that rode the tumult there
U...

A garland of quotations XXXIII

For grownups

For kids

For anyone, I guess

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest.
•Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

It was a quick-witted school, and knew how to turn quotations and allusions. Much of its art, like the art of the Euphues, is bestowed on making pedantry look attract...

A garland of quotations XXXII

CLICK ME, SUCKER!

What is the greatest question in the world? The greatest question is that of getting food to eat.
•Mao Zedong, The Hsiang River Review #1 (1919).

The economic problem, the struggle for subsistence, always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.
•John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930).

There’s no such thing as time.
•Stock answer t...