““You split hairs.”
“Better to split hairs than the heads beneath them.””
Source: Eifelheim (2006), Chapter XXV (p. 447)
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Michael Flynn 19
American statistician and writer 1947–2023Related quotes

“I'll tell you now that's the mother-fucker whose head I split open.”

“When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”
In a letter to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
Context: By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.

This seems to be a paraphrase sumarizing a speech at the Carrie Tuggle Institute, Birmingham, as described in Thinking Black: Some of the Nation's Best Black Columnists Speak Their Mind (1997) by DeWayne Wickham
Misattributed

Short fiction, The White Horse Child (1979)