“It follows from this that tauromachy can be taken for the typical example of an art in which the essential condition of beauty is a difference of phase, a deviation, a dissonance. No aesthetic pleasure would thus be possible without there being violation, transgression, excess and sin in relation to an ideal order serving as a rule; nevertheless absolute license, like absolute order, could only ever be an insipid abstraction devoid of meaning. Just as lurking death gives colour to life, so sin, and dissonance (which contains the seeds of, and suggests, possible destruction) confers beauty on the rule, extricates it from its state of fixed norm and turns it into an active, magnetic pole from which we move away or towards which we tend. Just as regret for lost innocence gives flavour and fragrance to vice, so order, the rule (which acts like a force of compression) is as necessary to the fulgurating blossoming of the left-sided element as is a fulcrum to the action of a lever. And so reappearing here and there in the imaginary tangential point (a limit towards which we tend, but which, like the torero, we finally avoid, a total revelation – a complete tangency to the world and to ourselves, a fusion of our entire being with the whole – only able to transpire at the instant of death) are the two ascending and descending branches of the curve, an image of that continual rocking motion which, when we perceive it clearly, strikes us with ecstasy and dizziness because it is, without doubt, the most fitting symbol of what is in truth the bedrock of our passionate life.”

(Michel Leiris, Mirror of Tauromachy, trans. Antony Melville, pp. 43–44.)

“Fleming did most of the talking. He ended up by asking us if we knew the definition of a gentleman. He waited and then said slowly:

‘A gentleman is a person who uses the butter-knife when he’s alone.’

He looked at us triumphantly and we tried to force a laugh. My growing dislike crystallized. It was degrading to have to laugh at anything so suburban and B.B.C. It wasn’t even improper, and I’d been preparing my face for something dirty!

I turned to Paul, saying it was time to get ready for dinner.”

(Denton Welch, Maiden Voyage, p. 100.)

“The idea which occurs to me is this. Bierstadt has invented a car which opens out into a room 27 feet wide. The Russian & German governments have taken it up; the N.Y. Central people are about to go into it. It is a very practical thing. It goes about like a car, and then can be transofrmed in a few minutes, by lifting the roof and drawing up sides for part of the roof and by letting down inner sides for a floor and other movements, into a chapel, or a theatre, or a picture gallery, or a shop, etc.

I believe a car costs $8000. It is quite cheap. Now let Hegeler pay me $2000 and I will get him the right to build a number of such cars for Sunday or other lectures on the Religion of Science, which being sent about the country & free sermons & lectures given, & would distribute the Open Court and raise that to a satisfactory paying basis. The lecturers (preferably two) would sleep and eat in the car, and their expenses would be light. If it would add to the inducement I will give 100 lectures.”

(Charles Sanders Peirce, letter to Francis C. Russell, 5 November 1896, quoted on p. 256 of Joseph Brent’s Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life.

“Mademoiselle Charlotte Elizabeth Peirce
and
Doctor Charles Henry Peirce          at Salem

Today at 12 o’clock was born a boy. Its mother and it are both doing ‘finely’ and send you their very best love. The boy would have written, but is prevented by circumstances over which he has no control. He does not like this blue ink he says. He hung himself this afternoon to a pair of steelyards; but postponed the further execution of his wicked designs upon himself, because he found he wanted just one quarter of a pound of the nine pound which he regards as the minimum of genteel and fashionable suicide. At 8 1/2 this morning his mother – if she can be called his mother before he was – his future mother, or more transcendentally, the mother of this then child of futurity was well – or nearly so, the shadows of coming events having but slightly obscured the brightness of her countenance.

               B. Peirce”

(Kenneth Laine Kettner, His Glassy Essence: an Autobiography of Charles Sanders Peirce, pp. 63–64.)

“To the famous Mr. Jukes is this book dedicated in appreciation for the use of Mr. Jukes’ descendant, Detective Simon Grundt of the Lincoln School for the Feeble-Minded.”

(Harry Stephen Keeler, The Green Jade Hand: In Which a New and Quite Different Type of Detective Unravels a Mystery Staged in Chicago, Bagdad on the Lakes, London of the West! (1930), p. v.)