There are… things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself, and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “Notes from the Underground,” 1864
And if you find everything as soon as you look for it, you find it in vain, you look for it in vain. – Antonio Porchia, Voces, 1943, translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin
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
