A Well Turned Phrase

Sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken

— From Hans Christian Andersen's "The Story of a Mother"

According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word “bulldozer” was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dicti

In the end, recovering the mix of the original and the present in a car under restoration means coming to terms with “patina,” and if you hear someone talk of a car’s patina, you have probably run into someone who is a practicing automotive archeologist, whether or not he or she knows it. To the restorer obsessed with the image of the car the “way

Saints always have a past and sinners always have a future.

— Oscar Wilde

SpaceX's flight test of its Starship spacecraft ended with a "rapid unscheduled disassembly."

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

-- Galileo Galilei

I always like to say that Iranian cinema emerges out of a thousand years of poetry, and Canadian cinema emerges out of fifty years of discount furniture commercials,

— Matthew Rankin

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. It cheapens and degrades the human experience, when it should inspire and elevate.

—Tom Waits