After-Orts #70
Immortality is a by-product of good work.
Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.
-- both, Mel Brooks, quoted in a NYT story, 30 March 1975, by Herbert Gold, Funny is Money,
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/03/30/archives/funny-is-money-2000yearold-48yearold-mel-brooks-comedy-is-not.html
The first of these quips is quoted in turn in Steven Isserlis, The Bach Cello Suites: A Companion
I myself confess daily to this eminent creator and seek to purify and strengthen myself through him.
-- Robert Schumann, of Johann Sebastian Bach, quoted in the same Isserlis book
We are as much made of words as we are of flesh and blood. Personality dissolves in an unfamiliar language like a sugar cube dropped into a cup of tea; estrangement from a mother tongue can be as painful as estrangement from an actual mother.
-- Alexandra Schwartz, Shifting Identities in Sanaz Toossi's "English", New Yorker, Feb.28, 2022
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/shifting-identities-in-sanaz-toossis-english
- an online toaster museum -
https://www.toastermuseum.com/index.htm