A Well Turned Phrase

Legal education was regarded by many Italian humanists as a training in pettifoggery and organized greed, withering the soul. It benefited only the rich, who could afford to pay for the best legal advice.

—James Hankins

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

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

We called my English teacher Scab for no particular reason except that it took the edge off our terror. A big man in a double breasted jacket, he wore tinted glasses that hid his expression. His head looked as if it had been carved rather carelessly from a boiled ham. “You are not going to like me,” he said to us in our first class, when I was 13.

…(W)e are surrounded by the Lululemon crowd at this beautiful outdoor cafe. What Tom Wolfe called the Social X-Rays are brunching, and unlike my kids and me, they did not order extra pancakes on top of their regular orders. We seem to have to taste as much variety as possible, so every order has an extra side order. This crowd though is slightly

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
—Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

It is useful to read certain authors before one realizes – either through one’s own or others’ critical diktats – that they should not in fact be read. Kipling floats in and out of fashion. When I encountered him I imagine he was pretty much out, but Just So Stories and the Jungle Books (titles whose destruction by Disney’s huns was still a future

Voght described the attendees’ looks as “a smear of pastels and florals — ruffles on their dresses, cowboy boots on their feet, bows on their curls. The aesthetic could be summed up as Laura Ingalls Wilder-core, as if the little house on the prairie had been down the street from a Sephora.” — MAGA and the single girl