“To the man with an ear for verbal delicacies — the man who searches painfully for the perfect word, and puts the way of saying a thing above the thing said — there is in writing the constant joy of sudden discovery, of happy accident.”
Source: 1910s, A Book of Prefaces (1917), Ch. 2
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H.L. Mencken281
American journalist and writer 1880–1956Related quotes
John Bartholomew Gough (1817–1886) Anglo-American temperance orator
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 561.
“The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it--would.”
John Edensor Littlewood (1885–1977) English Mathematician
Note quotation marks: Littlewood is repeating a joke without attribution. "Cross-purposes, Unconscious Assumptions, Howlers, Misprints, etc.", p. 59.
Littlewood's Miscellany (1986)
“Happy will they be who lend ear to the words of the Dead.”
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XX Humorous Writings
“There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.”
Haruki Murakami book Hear the Wind Sing
Source: Hear the Wind Sing
Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator
This Business of Living (1935-1950)
Paul de Lagarde (1827–1891) German polymath, biblical scholar and orientalist
Es ist das höchste Glück des Menschen, anzubeten, oder, milder gesagt, andre Menschen über sich anzuerkennen, die er liebt und die ihn lieben.
Paul de Lagarde: Erinnerungen aus seinem Leben für die Freunde zusammengestellt (1894), S. 40
as cited in The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961), p. 29
Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church
As quoted in "Pope Francis: Donald Trump 'is not Christian'", by Rebecca Kaplan, CBS News (18 February 2016) http://www.cbsnews.com/news/pope-francis-trump-is-not-christian/ <br class="br">2010s, 2016, Visit to Mexico (February 2016)