The Last Samurai

by Helen DeWitt

Linda had gone to the piano and begun to play Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor, a bitter piece of music which gains in tragic intensity when played 40 times in a row.

Ludoviticus

Oh dear

Gradually they would approach the level of the other branches of the arts which are so much further developed. Perhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases or lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes,

So Ezra Pound, basically

It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can’t do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness.

Guard: What’s his name? I wish people wouldn’t ask that kind of question.

Four days went by. I tried to be careful but you can’t always be careful and one day I went to look something up in Isaiah. I got out my Tanach and he came over and looked and that was that.

He was a linguist, and therefore he had pushed the bounds of obstinacy well beyond anything that is conceivable to other men.

By morning he reckoned he must have walked a good 60 miles.

Wtf

authoritative work on the subject, W. S. Allen’s Vox Graeca. RD, being largely self-taught, had always made a point of pronouncing Greek with the pitch accents, with the result that no one could ever understand a word he said.

Any idiot can learn a language, all you have to do is keep going and sooner or later it all makes sense,

with mathematics you have to understand one thing to understand another, and you can’t always tell what the first thing is that you have to understand.

You’ve got to be able to read your opponent’s mind in a tight spot; it’s no use thinking how he ought to play his hand.

They had Ace Ventura Pet Detective which I had always wanted to see but Sibylla refused to get out; I suspected, however, that this might not be as efficacious as the Wilde.