“ ‘That is perfectly true,’ the president admitted, ‘but their work is also more difficult than ever before. Criminals who operate in the grand manner have all sorts of things at their disposal nowadays. Science has done much for modern progress, but unfortunately it can be of invaluable assistance to criminals as well; the hosts of evil have the telegraph and the motorcar at their disposal just as authority has, and some day they will make use of the airplane.’ ”

(Marcel Allain & Pierre Souvestre, Fantômas, trans. unknown, p. 3.)

“And so it all ended. Artha kama dharma moksa. Ask Kavya for the kay. And so everybody heard their plaint and all listened to their plause. The letter! The litter! And the soother the bitther! Of eyebrow pencilled, by lipstipple penned. Borrowing a word and begging the question and stealing tinder and slipping like soap. From dark Rasa Lane a sigh and a weep, from Lesbia Looshe the beam in her eye, from lone Coogan Barry his arrow of song, from Sean Kelly’s anagrim a blush at the name, from I am the Sullivan that trumpeting tramp, from Suffering Dufferin the Sit of her Style, from Kathleen May Vernon her Mebbe fair efforts, from Fillthepot Curran his scotchlove machreether, from hymn Op. 2 Phil Adolphos the weary O, the leery, O, from Samyouwill Leaver or Damyouwell Lover thatjolly old molly bit or that bored saunter by, from Timm Finn again’s weak tribes, loss of strenghth to his sowheel, from the wedding on the greene, agirlies, the gretnass of joyboys, from Pat Mullen, Tom Mallon, Dan Meldon, Don Maldon a slickstick picnic made in Moate by Muldoons. The solid man saved by his sillied woman. Crackajolking away like a hearse on fire. The elm that whimpers at the top told the stone that moans when stricken. Wind broke it. Wave bore it. Reed wrote of it. Syce ran with it. Hand tore it and wild went war. Hen trieved it and plight pledged peace. It was folded with cunning, sealed with crime, uptied by a harlot, undone by a child. It was life but was it fair? It was free but was it art? The old hunks on the hill read it to perlection. It made ma make merry and sissy so shy and rubbed some shine off Shem and put some shame into Shaun. Yet Una and Ita spill famine with drought and Agrippa, the propastored, spells tripulations in his threne. Ah, furchte fruchte, timid Danaides! Ena milo melomon, frai is frau and swee is too, swee is two when swoo is free, ana mala woe is we! A pair of sycopanties with amygdaleine eyes, one old obster lumpky pumpkin and three meddlars on their slies. And that was how framm Sin fromm Son, acity arose, finfin funfun, a sitting arrows. Now tell me, tell me, tell me then!”

(Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 93–4.)

“The next accurate information we obtained was from C. R. W. Nevinson, who had met him at a luncheon with Grant Richards, Firbank’s publisher. Nevinson had once divined in him an amusing character. He described his appearance to us, I remember, and related how after the meal Firbank, rising willowly to his feet, observed, ‘Now I must go to the Bank.’ ‘But they are all shut. You won’t be able to get in!’ objected Richards; to which Firbank, displaying his long, unmuscular arms and thin fingers, replied anxiously, ‘What? Not even with my crowbar?’ ”

(Osbert Sitwell, pp. xi–xii in his introduction to the New Directions edition of Ronald Firbank’s Five Novels.)

“And it’s just the same with the inner life of man. Anyone can know about it nowadays. How the devil am I to prove to my counsel that I don’t know my murderous impulses through C. G. Jung, jealousy through Marcel Proust, Spain through Hemingway, Paris through Ernst Jünger, Switzerland through Mark Twain, Mexico through Graham Greene, my fear of death through Bernanos, inability to ever reach my destination through Kafka, and all sorts of other things through Thomas Mann? It’s true, you never even have to read these authorities, you can absorb them through your friends who also live all their experiences second-hand.”

(Max Frisch, I’m Not Stiller, trans. Michael Bullock, p. 158.)

(Émile Bernard, Still Life with Flowers, 1887, Norton Simon Museum.)

“225. In blaming myself, as often I have done, and may have occasion to do again, for my want of affection to other people, I must also express continually, as I think back about it, more and more wonder that ever anybody had any affection for me. I thought they might as well have got fond of a camera-lucida or an ivory foot-rule: all my faculty was merely in showing that such and such things were so; I was no orator, no actor, no painter but in a minute and generally invisible manner and I couldn’t bear being interrupted in anything I was about.

Nevertheless, some sensible grown-up people did get to like me! – the best of them with a protective feeling that I wanted guidance no less than sympathy; and the higher religious souls, hoping to lead me to the golden gates.”

(John Ruskin, Præterita, Volume II, Chapter XII, p. 405 in the Everyman’s edition.)

“162. I must not, however, anticipate of this eventful history so far as to discuss at present any manner of the resemblance in my fate, or work, or home companionship to those of St Anthony of Padua; but may record, as immediately significant, the delight which both my mother and I took in the possession of a really practical pigstye in our Danish farmyard, (the coach-house and stables being to us of no importance in comparison); the success with which my mother directed the nurture, and fattening, of the piglings; the civil and jovial character of the piglings so nurtured, indicated especially by their habit of standing in a row on their hind-legs to look over the fence, whenever my mother came into the yard: and conclusively by the satisfaction with which even our most refined friends would accept a present of pork – or it might be, alas! sometimes of sucking pig – from Denmark Hill.”

(John Ruskin, Præterita, Volume II, Chapter VIII, p. 346 in the Everyman’s edition.)