I always used to think that there’s only one flaw with Pride and Prejudice, and that is the absence of a 30-page sex scene between Elizabeth and Darcy.

- Martin Amis

Dame Ethel devotes the second half of her book to her adventures in Egypt, including the laying-out of a nine-hole golf course in the Nubian desert and her investigation into the nature of a hermaphrodite. But she does not say whether the hermaphrodite played golf, or what was its handicap!

-Agate, Ego (82)

Romanticism: In Romanticism thought and feeling are fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on which one must act; for one is embarked—engagé, as the 20C existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair; impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths, which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more complex than any  set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensible. They rise out the people, whose own mind-and-heart provides the makings of high culture. The errors of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life itself being a heroic tragedy.

–Barzun, Dawn to Decadence (491)

Theology: Ces auteurs, me repartit-il, n'ont point cherche dans l'Ecriture ce qu'il faut croire, mais ce qu'ils croient eux-mêmes; ils ne l'ont point regardée comme un livre ou étaient contenus les dogmes qu'ils devaient recevoir mais comme un ouvrage qui pourrait donner de l'autorité a leurs propres idées.

-Montesquieu, Lettres Persanes (299)

'Mais c'est quoi, la dialetique?' 'C'est l'art et la manier de toujours retomber sur ses patte, mon vieux!'

-Jorge Semprun, Quel Beau Dimanche