[Alexander North] Whitehead is supposed to have said of, Bertrand] Russell: “Bertie thinks me muddleheaded and I think Bertie simple-minded.” - Randall Jarrell

Age could not wither nor custom stale her infinite monotony: in fact, neither Age nor Custom could do anything (as they said, their voices rising) with the American novelist Gertrude Johnson.

...whether they write poems or don’t write poems, poets are best.

When we think of the masterpieces that nobody praised and nobody read, back there in the past, we feel an impatient superiority to the readers of the past. If we had been there, we can’t help feeling, we’d have known that Moby-Dick was a good book — why, how could anyone help knowing? But suppose someone says to us, “Well, you’re here now: what’s our own Moby-Dick? What’s the book that, a hundred years from now, everybody will look down on us for not having liked?” What do we say then?