Anecdotal Evidence

“It’s not a showy word but a worker word, a syntactic functionary; and yet, for all its organizational aplomb, it secretly delights in nuanc...

Jules Renard writes in his journal on July 26, 1899: “More than once I have tried being morose for a whole day. I have not succeeded. Not ev...

“Do you ever feel that you spend too much time with books?”   The answer true to the spirit of the age would be to respond in the positive...

“Feeling admiration for someone is a privilege that becomes a calamity when the person we admire dies.”   With age, such calamities prolif...

I sensed in Jane Greer, even through the unreliable conduit of the internet, an ebullient spirit utterly unlike myself, which is why I felt ...

“It teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuat...

Dr. Johnson famously contributed several couplets to Oliver Goldsmith’s “ The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society ” (1764), including:   ...