“NOTES: Jean Cololère, a drummer in the colonial troops at Québec, was imprisoned for duelling in 1751. In the cell next to his was Françoise Laurent, who had been sentenced to hang for stealing. Except for letters of pardon, the only way at the time for someone under sentence of death to escape hanging was, for a man, to become a hangman, or, for a woman, to marry one. Françoise persuaded Cololère to apply for the vacant (and undesirable) post of executioner, and also to marry her.
—Condensed from the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Volume III, 1741-1770”
Selected Poems 1976-1986 (1987), Marrying the Hangman
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Margaret Atwood 348
Canadian writer 1939Related quotes
Apr 2014. As quoted/attributed in : Another SP leader’s rape remark sparks outrage https://web.archive.org/web/20140618193004/http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/another-sp-leaders-rape-remark-sparks-outrage/article5902266.ece
Source: Democracy: An American Novel (1880), Ch. XI
“If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
talk at St. Michael's College, Vermont, around 1990 http://www.chomsky.info/talks/1990----.htm.
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994
“The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.”
Canto III, line 21.
The Rape of the Lock (1712, revised 1714 and 1717)
"The South". Cf. "The Man on the Threshold", in The Aleph (1949)
tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Ficciones (1944)
Variant: On the floor, curled against the bar, lay an old man, as motionless as an object. The many years had worn him away and polished him, as a stone is worn smooth by running water or a saying is polished by generations of mankind.