Only the use of footnotes enables historians to make their texts not monologues but conversations, in which modern scholars, their predecessors, and their subjects all take part. – Anthony Grafton (b.1950), The Footnote: A Curious History, “Epilogue: Some Concl

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words. – E.M. Cioran, “Atrophy of Utterance,” All Gall Is Divided: Gnomes and Apothegms,

Aphorism, n.: A concise, clever statement you don’t think of until too late. – James Alexander Thom