To appreciate and use correctly a valuable maxim requires a genius, a vital appropriating exercise of mind, closely allied to that which first created it. – William Rounseville Alger, “The Utility and the Futility of Aphorisms,” The Atla

I can get myself awfully worked up, just as a fine sentence or paragraph can send me into shivery rapture. – Steve Almond, “Night of the Living Freak,” Candyfreak: A Journey through the Cho

[W]hen I hear or read a good line I can hardly wait to tell it to somebody else… – Robert Byrne, The Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said,

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise. – William Irwin Thompson