“The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life.”
Said the surrealist Andre Breton, explaining the possible provenance of some of his strange and early literature.
Sergei Yesenin (1895-1925) was a Russian lyric poet who, at age 30, hung himself. Vladimir Mayakovsky, his contemporary and also a Russian poet, angrily and in print condemned Sergei Yesenin for his “cowardly” suicide. Five year before he, Mayakovsky, then shot himself.
The earliest hints of evolutionary theory can be found in Anaximander, Sixth Century, BC.
“A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man.”
Said Ernest Hemingway of T.S. Eliot.
“We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.”
Said the Ex Muslim Wafa Sultan, correctly.
John Keats pronounced his own name with such a thick cockney accent that his friend Leigh Hunt nicknamed him “Junkets.”
Junkets evidently being the way “John Keats” sounded coming out of John Keats’s own mouth.
The “Wicked Bible,” from London, 1632, omitted the word not from the 7th Commandment:
Thou shalt commit adultery.
The first priest was the first rogue who crossed paths with the first fool.
Said Voltaire.
Man is the only animal that knows he must die.
Said Voltaire.
A man may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Said Samuel Butler.
Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.
Echoed Wittgenstein.
The English writer Anthony Burgess — most famous for his novella A Clockwork Orange, which Stanley Kubrick subsequently made into a movie — had eyesight so poor that he once accidentally walked into a bank in Stratford-on-Avon and ordered a drink!
Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.
Said Lord Byron.
“The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum” an early French critic called Dostoevsky.
The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon;
Where gott’st thou that goose look?
Wrote Shakespeare in Act 5, Scene III of Macbeth.
“Now, friend, what means thy change of countenance?”
Substituted one William Davenant, in a hacked-up version which nevertheless played for nearly a century.
Strabo’s Geography, dated 7 B.C., states that the world is round and that one could reach India by sailing westward from Spain….
April 5th, 2011 at 7:58 pm
I’ll play.
The atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, thriving around 440 and 420 B.C. respectively, offered a point of view very similar to modern science.
They believed everything was composed of atoms which are physically but not geometrically indivisible. They also asserted there’s empty space between atoms, atoms are always in motion, and atoms differ in size and shape.