But in the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse. – Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy, 1948
People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy. – Gary Saul Morson, The Long and Short of It: From Aphorism to Novel, 2012

