Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of mans cruelty and baseness. – Bryant H. McGill

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. – C. S. Lewis

…a bourgeois barrenness… depressingly alien from that dainty boudoir atmosphere of the artist-life she knew. – Israel Zangwill, Dreamers of the Ghetto, “From a Mattress Grave,” 1897