Tracing Quotations
Leon Trotsky? Fannie Hurst? James Burnham? O. H. Steiner? Marshall Berman? Michael Walzer? Donald Barthelme? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: Several sayings have employed the following templates: (1) You may not be interested in X, but X is interested in you. (2) We may not be interested in X, but X is interested in us. (3) …
Continue reading “You May Not Be Interested in War, But War Is Interested in You”
Donald Barthelme? Fannie Hurst? Gore Vidal? Dear Quote Investigator: A wide variety of sayings have employed the following template: You may not be interested in X, but X is interested in you. Different terms have been substituted for X including: war, politics, dialectic, and strategy. In addition, variant templates have occurred: We may not be …
Continue reading “You May Not Be Interested in Absurdity, But Absurdity Is Interested in You”
Donald Barthelme? William Butler Yeats? Dear Quote Investigator: A poet once proclaimed with despair that the center cannot hold. The postmodern storyteller Donald Barthelme quipped that the center would not hold if it was welded together by a distracted worker. Would you please help me to find a citation. Also, I cannot recall the name …
Donald Barthelme? Apocryphal? Dear Quote Investigator: When I was a young child I found the number of books in my local library overwhelming. I wondered how one could find the time to read so many books? When I was a slightly older child, I concluded that there were a enormous number that you don’t have …
Continue reading “The Thing About Books Is, There Are Quite a Number You Don’t Have To Read”