A reference to George Meredith's style.
The Decay of Lying (1889)
Shakespeare, en tombant ainsi sur moi à l'improviste, me foudroya. Son éclair, en m'ouvrant le ciel de l'art avec un fracas sublime, m'en illumina les plus lointaines profondeurs. Je reconnus la vraie grandeur, la vraie beauté, la vraie vérité dramatiques.
Source: Mémoires (1870), Ch. 18, p. 66
“2144. He that has no Fools, Knaves nor Beggars in his Family, was begot by a Flash of Lightning.”
Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.”
Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) austrian dramatic and writer
Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 1"
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: What is so painful about that time is that nothing was disastrous. It was all wrong, ugly, unhappy and coloured with cynicism, but nothing was tragic, there were no moments that could change anything or anybody. From time to time the emotional lightning flashed and showed a landscape of private misery, and then — we went on dancing. <!-- 128
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher
17 April 1823.
Table Talk (1821–1834)
Context: Kean is original; but he copies from himself. His rapid descents from the hyper-tragic to the infra-colloquial, though sometimes productive of great effect, are often unreasonable. To see him act, is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning. I do not think him thorough-bred gentleman enough to play Othello.
