“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.)

“Poetry brings similitude and representation to configurations waiting from forever to be spoken. North Americans have tended to confuse human fate with their own salvation. In this I am North American. ‘We are coming Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more,’ sand the Union troops at Gettysburg.”

(Susan Howe, from “There Are Not Leaves Enough to Crown to Cover to Crown to Cover,” p. 14 in The Europe of Trusts.)

“People buy a diary because the author is famous, while I wrote mine in order to become famous. That is where the misunderstanding lies.”

(Witold Gombrowicz, A Kind of Testament, trans. Alastair Hamilton, p. 120.)

“André Weil, in fact, invented for this book the universal notation we use today for the empty set: ∅.

This symbol comes from the Norwegian alphabet, which Weil had encountered in his travels. The Bourbaki text on set theory thus introduced this new mathematical symbol.”

(Amir Aczel, The Artist and the Mathematician: the story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who never existed, p. 93.)