Well, if it isn't Aurora Ratchett, goddess of the dawn, a sight for sore eyes.... I always think of Ebenezer Pritchett, the day he... led that last charge at Shiloh. There was a gallant trooper, your father. You know, there went a man of quality. There went the flower of the South.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Solitary and farouche people don't have relationships; they are quite unrelatable. If you and I were capable of being altogether h...ouse-trained and made jolly, we should be nicer people, but not writers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humo...ur varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The only serious rival to Pepys is Boswell, but Boswell is a snail without a shell. He trails through life unhoused and exclamator...y, whereas Pepys is housed and sotto voce. Boswell is confessional before anything else, whereas, though he too tells all, Pepys is not; he records for the sensual pleasure of record. Boswell adores his damned soul to the point of tears and is in shameless, ramshackle pursuit of father-figures who will offer salvation. Unlike Pepys, he has above all a conceit of his own peculiar genius. Pepys has no notion of genius. Where Pepys is an eager careerist, struck by the wonder of it, Boswell has no career; he has only a carousel, and it is odd that the careerist has a more genuine sense of pleasure than the Calvinist libertine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »