“I see you have a lot of ancestors said Mr Salteena in a jelous tone, who are they.

Well said Bernard they are all quite correct. This is my aunt Caroline she was rather exentrick and quite old.

So I see said Mr Salteena and he passed on to a lady with a very tight waist and quearly shaped. That is Mary Ann Fudge my grandmother I think said Bernard she was very well known in her day.

Why asked Ether who was rarther curious by nature.

Well I dont quite know said Bernard but she was and he moved away to the next picture. It was of a man with a fat smiley face and a red ribbon around him and a lot of medals. My great uncle Ambrose Fudge said Bernard carelessly.

He looks a thourough ancestor said Ethel kindly.

Well he was said Bernard in a proud tone he was really the Sinister son of Queen Victoria.

Not really cried Ethel in excited tones but what does that mean.

Well I dont quite know said Bernard Clark it puzzles me very much but ancesters do turn quear at times.

Perhaps it means god son said Mr Salteena in an inteligent voice.

Well I dont think so aid Bernard but I mean to find out.

It is very grand anyhow said Ethel.

Who is this said Mr Salteena halting at a picture of a lady holding up some grapes and smiling a great deal.

Her name was called Minnie Pilato responded Bernard she was rarther far back but a real relation and she was engaged to the earl of Tullyvarden only it did not quite come off.

What a pity cried Ethel.

Yes it was rarther replied Bernard but she married a Captain in the Navy and had seven children so she was quite alright.

Here Mr Salteena thourght he had better go to bed as he had had a long jornney. . . .”

(Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters: or, Mr. Salteena’s Plan, pp. 36–38.)

“A young man of twenty-two, carrying a copy of Paradise Lost when he set sail on the Beagle six years before Victoria ascended the throne, Darwin was a Romantic. He played the piano to worms, thought about the free will of dogs and oysters, called his eldest son Mr Hoddy Doddy, liked novels with pretty women and happy endings, and was basically a good egg.”

(Angelique Richardson, review of George Levine’s Darwin Loves You: Natural selection and the re-enchantment of the world, Times Literary Supplement, 27 July 2007, p. 11.)

     “Fòrse sé tu gustassi unal sòl volta
La millésima parte délle giòje,
Ché gusta un còr amato riamando,
Diresti ripentita sospirando,
Perduto è tutto il tempo
Ché in amar non si spènde.”

(Tasso, quoted in Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk as an epigraph to Chapter II.)

“A memoir is a history,” he said. “It’s a story with a debt, a debt to the past. You pay the debt in the coin of truth.”

“Hmmm,” I said, nodding thoughtfully but noncommittally.

(Eric Kraft, On the Wing, p. 156)

“The people who write book reviews, write about the arts – the people who write about these things are nobodies. Often they’re honest enough to know that they are nobodies and they have no right to these opinions. Yes, everybody’s got the same feelings, I know that. And all feelings are equal. [But] when it comes to high culture, everybody’s not equal. Some people know more than other people. If I’m going to be instructed on brain surgery, I’m not going read Stephen King. It’s the first rule of criticism. No one but your mother cares about your opinion. Start with that. You’re a blank slate. Forget the author. He’s at least written on his slate. And you’re going to write about his writing on his slate. And you’re going to pass [judgment]: ‘Oh, I just hated his work. My god he’s an awful man. I can just tell.’ Well, this kind of bogus moralizing goes on. We haven’t had a decent literary critic in my lifetime. We’ve had good critics who bury themselves in the academy and are never seen again, particularly by their students. We occasionally have great explainers like Edmund Wilson, who stopped reviewing novels around 1945. Just when my generation really needed a critic, he’s doing the Iroquois Indians – which is probably far more useful. So we are adrift. Even the worst newspaper in England has better book reviewers than The New York Times. So don’t pass judgment. Now, what do you do if you have to review a book? The most difficult thing on earth, and most people don’t know how difficult it is, because most people can’t do it: describe what it was that you read. If you do that properly you don’t have to throw adjectives around and make cute noises. Just describe it. The words that you use for the description will lead the criticism. Now if you can plow that into some heads, you will have done great work.”

(Gore Vidal, interviewed by John Esther in the Gay & Lesbian Review.)

“Next day, in their little drawing room, with its black divan, yellow cushions, and draftproof bay whose new window seemed to magnify the slow steady straight-falling snowflakes (coincidentally stylized on the cover of the current issue of The Beau & the Butterfly which lay on the window ledge), Ada discussed her ‘dramatic career.’ The whole matter secretly nauseated Van (so that, by contrast, her Natural History passion acquired a nostalgic splendor). For him the written word existed only in its abstract purity, in its unrepeatable appeal to an equally ideal mind. It belonged solely to its creator and could not be spoken or enacted by a mime (as Ada insisted) without letting the deadly stab of another’s mind destroy the artist in the very lair of his art. A written play was intrinsically superior to the best performance of it, even if directed by the author himself. Otherwise, Van agreed with Ada that the talking screen was certainly preferable to the live theater for the simple reason that with the former a directory could attain, and maintain, his own standards of perfection throughout an unlimited number of performances.”

(Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, p. 323)

“About five or six years ago, I was invited to make etchings at the Crown Point Press in California. I accepted immediately, even though I didn’t know how to make them, because about twenty years before, I was invited to trek in the Himalayas, and didn’t. I later discovered that the walk was going to be on elephants with servants, and I’ve always regretted that missed opportunity.”

(John Cage, from an interview in 1982 with Stephen Montague.)

“It’s difficult, in other words, to define in precise terms the imprecision of amorous moods, which consist in a joyous impatience to possess a void, in a greedy expectation of what might come to me from the void, and also in the pain of being still deprived of what I am impatiently and greedily expecting, in the tormenting pain of feeling myself already potentially doubled to possess potentially something potentially mine, and yet forced not to possess, to consider not mine and therefore potentially another’s what I potentially possess. The pain of having to bear the fact that the potentially mine is also potentially another’s, or, for all I know, actually another’s; this greedy jealous pain is a state of such fullness that it makes you believe being in love consists entirely and only in pain, that the greedy impatience is nothing but jealous desperation, and the emotion of impatience is only the emotion of despair that twists within itself, becoming more and more desperate, with the capacity that each particle of despair has for redoubling and arranging itself symmetrically by the analogous particle and for tending to move from its own state to enter another, perhaps worse state which rends and lacerates the former.”

(Italo Calvino, “Mitosis” in t zero, p. 71, trans. William Weaver.)