...For every ten jokes - thou hast got an hundred enemies... - Laurence Sterne

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; — — they are the life, the soul of reading; — take them out of this book, for instance, — you might as well take the book along with them; — one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer, — — he steps forth like a bridegroom, — bids All hail, brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.

Now don't let us give ourselves a parcel of airs, and pretend that the oaths we make free with in this land of liberty of ours are our own; and because we have the spirit to swear them, — imagine that we have had the wit to invent them too.

There are a thousand unnoticed openings, continued my father, which let a penetrating eye at once into a man's soul; and I maintain it, added he, that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room, — or take it up in going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him.