"In a democratic age, in the midst of a population which is able to read, no position is comparable for permanent influence and far-reaching power to that of an editor who understands his vocation." W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, 1886.
"Entropy is a figure of speech, then," sighed Nafastis, "a metaphor. It connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow. The Machine uses both. The Demon makes the metaphor mot only verbally graceful, but also objectively true." Thomas Pynchon, in The Crying of Lot 49, 1965.
"EPIHODOV: Speaking precisely, not touching upon other subjects, I'm bound to admit about myself, that destiny behaves mercilessly to me, as a storm to a little boat. If, let's suppose, I am mistaken, then why did I wake up this morning, to quote an example, and look round, and there on my chest was a spider of fearful magnitude... like this." Anton Chekhoc, in The Cherry Orchard, 1904
"La veritable eloquence consiste a dire tout ce qu'il faut, et a ne dire que ce qu'il faut." L Rouchefoucauld, 1671.
"The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else's fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger's fate, by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about." Walter Benjamin, in "The Novel as Displacement: Structuralism."
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