[T]hinking, thinking, remembering, biding her time, uttering extensive dreamy theories and troubling witticisms, with an occasional incorrectness of folk-songs in her speech. – Glenway Wescott, December 1929 [Referring to Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1881&ndash

…though many a gatherer has carried his basket through these diamond districts of the mind… – William Rounseville Alger, “The Utility and the Futility of Aphorisms,” The Atla

Quotation mistakes, inadvertency, expedition, and human lapses, may make not only moles but warts in learned authors… – Thomas Browne, Christian Morals, 1716 (Part the Second, sect. ii)

So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, light on every blossom, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive… – Desiderius Erasmus, De Copia, 1512, translated