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1 " So what else can I tell you?" I asked. " I mean, to get you to reveal Lily to me." She triangled her fingers under her chin. " Let's see. Are you a bed wetter?" " Am I a...?" " Bed wetter. I am asking if you are a bed wetter." I knew she was trying to get me to blink. But I wouldn't." No, ma'am. I leave my beds dry." " Not even a little drip every now and then?" " I'm trying hard to see how this is germane." " I'm gauging your honesty. What is the last periodical you read methodically?" " Vogue. Although, in the interest of full disclosure, that's mostly because I was in my mother's bathroom, enduring a rather long bowel movement. You know, the kind that requires Lamaze." " What adjective do you feel the most longing for?" That was easy. " I will admit I have a soft spot for fanciful." " Let's say I have a hundred million dollars and offer it to you. The only condition is that if you take it, a man in China will fall off his bicycle and die. What do you do?" " I don't understand why it matters whether he's in China or not. And of course I wouldn't take the money." The old woman nodded." Do you think Abraham Lincoln was a homosexual?" " All I can say for sure is that he never made a pass at me." " Are you a museumgoer?" " Is the pope a churchgoer?" " When you see a flower painted by Georgia O'Keefe, what comes to mind?" " That's just a transparent ploy to get me to say the word vagina, isn't it? There. I said it. Vagina. "
2 " But other hordes would come, and other false prophets. Our feeble efforts to ameliorate man’s lot would be but vaguely continued by our successors; the seeds of error and of ruin contained even in what is good would, on the contrary, increase to monstrous proportions in the course of centuries. A world wearied of us would seek other masters; what had seemed to us wise would be pointless for them, what we had found beautiful they would abominate. Like the initiate to Mithraism the human race has need, perhaps, of a periodical bloodbath and descent into the grave. I could see the return of barbaric codes, of implacable gods, of unquestioned despotism of savage chieftains, a world broken up into enemy states and eternally prey to insecurity. Other sentinels menaced by arrows would patrol the walls of future cities; the stupid, cruel, and obscene game would go on, and the human species in growing older would doubtless add new refinements of horror. Our epoch, the faults and limitations of which I knew better than anyone else would perhaps be considered one day, by contrast, as one of the golden ages of man. "
― Marguerite Yourcenar , Memoirs of Hadrian
3 " Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now—eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of weekday services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing; liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine, not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. "
― George Eliot , Adam Bede
4 " Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worst, and not the better nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit. "
― Henry David Thoreau , Slavery in Massachusetts
5 " We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. "