Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet
Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
The Metamorphosis (1915)
Raymond Carver (1938–1988) American short story author and poet
Source: Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories
“But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.”
Milan Kundera book Laughable Loves
Source: Laughable Loves
“A Clerk ther was of Oxenforde also.”
Geoffrey Chaucer book The Canterbury Tales
General Prologue, l. 287
The Canterbury Tales
Josefa Iloilo (1920–2011) President of Fiji
Opening address to the Great Council of Chiefs meeting, 27 July 2005 (excerpts)
“…blathering store clerks who can't stop saying "Have a nice day"…”
Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer
on annoying behaviour, 1994/5
Misc
Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities
The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942)
Variant: If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility. To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames. This principle, by which the old professor had lived, is simply a requisite of the sense of reality. But if there is a sense of reality, and no one will doubt that it has its justifications for existing, then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility. Whoever has it does not say, for instance: Here this or that has happened, will happen, must happen; but he invents: Here this or that might, could, or ought to happen. If he is told that something is the way it is, he will think: Well, it could probably just as well be otherwise. So the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not.