“The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week.”

Source: Pegasus

On Frédéric Chopin, in Oeuvres autobiographiques, edited by Georges Lubin, Vol. 2; Histoire de ma vie, p. 446. I [Jeffrey Kallberg] have modified somewhat the English translation printed in George Sand, Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand, group translation ed. Thelma Jurgrau (Albany, 1991), p. 1109. The chapter on Chopin dates from August or September 1854.
Context: His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring.

Source: Where the Red Fern Grows

The New Indian Express, in “An Avid Shutterbug, Driving Enthusiast, Sanskrit Scholar (17 December 2013)”

Source: Night World, No. 1

Death in the Clouds (1935)

The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Democritus Junior to the Reader

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek

(original Dutch: citaat van Jan Mankes, in het Nederlands:) ..voerlui, sjouwerslui en schippers.. ..aan het kanaal wordt permanent turf geladen en elk paard staat een half uur stil [tijd voor schetsen].

Quote, c. 1910, in Jan Mankes - kunstbeschouwingen van Albert Plasschaert & Just Havelaar; publisher J.A.A.M. van Es, Wassenaar, 1927; as cited by Susan van den Berg, in 'Tableau Fine Arts Magazine', 29e Jaargang, nummer 1, Feb/March 2007, p. 76

Jan is describing the activities at the canal the Schoterlandsche Compagnonsvaart (in De Knijpe); this was the daily view from the living-room of his parental home when Jan was 20 years.
1909 - 1914

Source: Mindswap (1966), Chapter 32 (p. 153)