Orts #778

 
Prominent among the curses of civilization is the map that folds up "convenient for the pocket." There are men who can do almost everything except shut a map. It is calculated that the energy wasted yearly in denouncing these maps to their face would build the Eiffel Tower in thirteen weeks.
     -- J.M. Barrie
 
 
 
Politics is often a millstone around democracy’s neck, . . .
     — the opening line of Terry Fallis’s second novel, The High Road (2010)
 
 
 
Thoreau said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Not me, baby. My desperation is noisy, voluble, and visible. 
     — Bob Mankoff (cartoon editor, The New Yorker)
 
 
 
. . .  books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field.
    — Virginia Woolf, in How Should One Read a Book? 
  https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c2/chapter22.html