Any political party that can't cough up anything better than a trecherous brain-damaged old vulture like Hubert Humphrey deserves every beating it gets. They don't hardly make 'em like Hubert any more - but just to be on the safe side, he should be castrated anyway.  - - - Hunter S. Thompson (about Hubert Humphrey, 1973)

He had a charisma that must have come out of an immaculate conception between Fidel Castro and Groucho Marx. They went into his soul and he came out looking like an ethnic milkshake--Jewish revolutionary, Puerto Rican lord, Italian street kid, Black Panther with the old Afro haircut, even a glint of Irish gunman in the mad, green eyes.  - - - Norman Mailer (about Abbie Hoffman, 1989)

He is racist, he's homophobic, he's xenophobic and he's a sexist. He's the perfect Republican candidate. ---- Bill Press (about Pat Buchanan)

He sits there in senile dementia with a gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy ... disgraceful, depraved ... and putrescent. - - - Hiram Johnson (about Harrison Grey Otis)

The ineffable dunce has nothing to say and says it with a liberal embellishment of bad delivery, embroidering it with reasonless vulgarities of attitude, gesture and attire. There never was an impostor so hateful, a blockhead so stupid, a crank so variously and offensively daft. He makes me tired.
- - - Ambrose Bierce (about Oscar Wilde, 1882) 

 

Oh my God, look at you. Anyone else hurt in the accident? - - - Don Rickles (to Ernest Borgnine)
Who picks your clothes - Stevie Wonder? - - - Don Rickles (to David Letterman on 02/5/96 "Late Show")
He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary. - - - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? - - - Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
He's phony, using his blackness to get his way. - - - Joe Frazier (about Muhammad Ali)

Joe Frazier is so ugly he should donate his face to the US Bureau of Wildlife. - - - Muhammad Ali
His writing is limited to songs for dead blondes. - - - Keith Richards (about Elton John)
I'm glad I've given up drugs and alcohol. It would be awful to be like Keith Richards. He's pathetic. It's like a monkey with arthritis, trying to go on stage and look young. I have great respect for the Stones but they would have been better if they had thrown Keith out 15 years ago. - - - Elton John (about Keith Richards)

If I were married to you, I'd put poison in your coffee.  - - - Lady Astor (to Winston Churchill)
If you were my wife, I'd drink it. - - - Winston Churchill, in reply
You will either die on the gallows or of a loathsome disease. - - - John Montague (to John Wilkes)
That depends on whether I embrace your principles or your mistress. - - - John Wilkes, in reply
Do you mind if I smoke? - - - Oscar Wilde (to Sarah Bernhardt)

I don't care if you burn.   - - - Sarah Bernhardt, in reply 

 

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Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts. - - - Clive James
He acts like he's got a Mixmaster up his ass and doesn't want anyone to know it. - - - Marlon Brando (about Montgomery Clift)
He couldn't ad-lib a fart after a baked-bean dinner. - - - Johnny Carson (about Chevy Chase)
He got a reputation as a great actor by just thinking hard about the next line. - - - King Vidor (about Gary Cooper)
He has turned almost alarmingly blond - he's gone past platinum, he must be plutonium; his hair is coordinated with his teeth. - - - Pauline Kael (about Robert Redford)

He looked like a half-melted rubber bulldog. - - - John Simon (about Walter Matthau)
He's the type of man who will end up dying in his own arms. - - - Mamie Van Doren (about Warren Beatty)
His ears made him look like a taxicab with both doors open. - - - Howard Hughes (about Clark Gable)
His favorite exercise is climbing tall people. - - - Phyllis Diller (about Mickey Rooney)
His features resembled a fossilized wash rag. - - - Alan Brien (about Steve McQueen)

Most of the time he sounds like he has a mouth full of wet toilet paper. - - - Rex Reed (about Marlon Brando)
Now there sits a man with an open mind. You can feel the draft from here. - - - Groucho Marx (about Chico Marx)
There were three things that Chico was always on - a phone, a horse, or a broad. - - - Groucho Marx (about his brother, Chico)
What makes him think a middle-aged actor, who's played with a chimp, could have a future in politics?
- - - Ronald Reagan (about Clint Eastwood running for mayor of Carmel)
You're so vain. You probably think this song is about you. - - - Carly Simon (about Warren Beatty)

Athletes

Beyond the hair, tattoos and earrings, he's just like you and me. - - - Bob Hill (about Dennis Rodman, 1995)
Dennis has become like a prostitute, but now it's gotten ridiculous, to the point where he will do anything humanly possible to make money. - - - Charles Barkley (about Dennis Rodman, 1997)
He has so many fish hooks in his nose, he looks like a piece of bait. - - - Bob Costas (about Dennis Rodman)
McEnroe was as charming as always, which means that he was as charming as a dead mouse in a loaf of bread. - - - Clive James (about John McEnroe)

Musicians

A deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, mincing heap of mother love. - - - William Connor (about Liberace)
Bambi with testosterone. - - - Owen Gleiberman (about Prince, 1990)
Boy George is all England needs - another queen who can't dress. - - - Joan Rivers
Elvis transcends his talent to the point of dispensing with it altogether.  - - - Greil Marcus (about Elvis Presley, 1976)
Even the deaf would be traumatized by prolonged exposure to the most hideous croak in Western culture. Richards's voice is simply horrible. - - - Nick Coleman (about Keith Richards)

He could be a maneuvering swine, which no one ever realized. - - - Paul McCartney (about John Lennon)
He looks like a dwarf who's been dipped in a bucket of pubic hair. - - - Boy George (about Prince, 1986)
He moves like a parody between a majorette girl and Fred Astaire. - - - Truman Capote (about Mick Jagger)
He plays four-and-a-half-hour sets. That's torture. Does he hate his audience? - - - John Lydon (about Bruce Springsteen)
He sings like he's throwing up. - - - Andrew O'Connor (about Bryan Ferry)

He sounds like he's got a brick dangling from his willy, and a food-mixer making purée of his tonsils.
- - - Paul Lester (about Jon Bon Jovi)
He was so mean it hurt him to go to the bathroom. - - - Britt Eklund (about Rod Stewart)
I love his work but I couldn't warm to him even if I was cremated next to him. - - - Keith Richards (about Chuck Berry)
I think Mick Jagger would be astounded and amazed if he realized to how many people he is not a sex symbol but a mother image. - - - David Bowie
Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes. - - - Aaron Copland

Michael Jackson was a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich white woman. - - - Molly Ivins
Michael Jackson's album was only called "Bad" because there wasn't enough room on the sleeve for "Pathetic." - - - The Artist Formerly Known as Prince (about Michael Jackson)
Pamela Lee said her name is tattooed on her husband's penis. Which explains why she changed her name from Anderson to Lee. - - - Conan O'Brien (about Tommy Lee)
Presley sounded like Jayne Mansfield looked - blowsy and loud and low. - - - Julie Burchill
Sleeping with George Michael would be like having sex with a groundhog. - - - Boy George

The instant asphalt Elvis from Philadelphia. - - - Fred Schuers (about Fabian)

When you talk to him, he looks at you and grins and grins and nods and nods and appears to be the world's best listener, until you realize he is not listening at all. - - - Larry L. King (about Willie Nelson) 

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History buffs probably noted the reunion at a Washington party a few weeks ago of three ex-presidents: Carter, Ford, and Nixon--See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Evil. - - - Robert J. Dole, speech, 1983
 
George Bush
A pin-stripin' polo-playin' umbrella-totin' Ivy-leaguer, born with a silver spoon so far in his mouth that you couldn't get it out with a crowbar. - - - Bill Baxley (about George Bush)
He can't help it - he was born with a silver foot in his mouth. - - - Ann Richards (about George Bush)
He' a Boy Scout with a hormone imbalance. - - - Kevin Phillips (about George Bush)
If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel, I want drilling rights on George Bush's head. - - - Jim Hightower, 1988

Jimmy Carter
He is your typical smiling, brilliant, back-stabbing, bull-shitting southern nut-cutter. - - - Lane Kirkland (about Jimmy Carter)
 
Winston Churchill
He has devoted the best years of his life to preparing his impromtu speeches. - - - F. E. Smith (about Winston Churchill)
He is a man suffering from petrified adolescence. - - - Aneurin Bevan (about Winston Churchill)
I thought he was a young man of promise; but it appears he was a young man of promises. - - - Arthur Balfour (about Winston Churchill)
 
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton's foreign policy experience is pretty much confined to having had breakfast once at the International House of Pancakes. - - - Pat Buchanan
I'm just sick and tired of presidents who jog. Remember, if Bill Clinton wins, we're going to have another four years of his white thighs flapping in the wind.- - - Arianna Huffington, 1995

Bob Dole
When he does smile, he looks as if he's just evicted a widow. - - - Mike Royko (about Bob Dole, 1988)

Gerald Ford
Hark, when Gerald Ford was king-- We were bored with everything. Unemployment 6 percent, What a boring president. Nothing major needed fixin' So he pardoned Richard Nixon. - - - Bill Strauss and Eliana Newport, 1982
He is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time. - - - Lyndon Baines Johnson (about Gerald Ford)
He's a nice guy, but he played too much football with his helmet off. - - - Lyndon Baines Johnson (about Gerald Ford)

Lyndon Baines Johnson

He turned out to be so many different characters he could have populated all of War and Peace and still had a few people left over. - - - Herbert Mitgang (about Lyndon Baines Johnson, 1980)

Richard Nixon

Avoid all needle drugs - the only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon. - - - Abbie Hoffman (1971)
He bleeds people. He draws every drop of blood and then drops them from a cliff. He'll blame any person he can put his foot on. - - - Martha Mitchell (about Richard M. Nixon, 1973)
He inherited some good instincts from his Quaker forebears, but by diligent hard work, he overcame them. - - - James Reston (about Richard Nixon)
He is a shifty-eyed goddamn liar....He's one of the few in the history of this country to run for high office talking out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and lying out of both sides. - - - Harry S Truman (about Richard M. Nixon, 1978)
He was like a kamikaze pilot who keeps apologizing for the attack. - - - Mary McGrory (about Richard M. Nixon, 1962)
Here is a guy who's had a stake driven through his heart. I mean, really nailed to the bottom of the coffin with a wooden stake, and a silver bullet through the forehead for good measure--and yet he keeps coming back. - - - Ted Koppel (about Richard M. Nixon, 1984)
I may not know much, but I know chicken shit from chicken salad. - - - Lyndon B. Johnson (about a speech by Richard M. Nixon)
I worship the quicksand he walks in. - - - Art Buchwald (about Richard Nixon)
Nixon's motto was: If two wrongs don't make a right, try three. - - - Norman Cousins (about Richard M. Nixon)
Sir Richard-the-Chicken-Hearted. - - - Hubert H. Humphrey (about Richard M. Nixon)

Dan Quayle
Dan Quayle is more stupid than Ronald Reagan put together. - - - Matt Groening, 1993
If life were fair, Dan Quayle would be making a living asking, "Do you want fries with that?" - - - John Cleese

RonaldReagan
A triumph of the embalmer's art. - - - Gore Vidal (about Ronald Reagan)
Compared to the Clintons, Reagan is living proof that a Republican with half a brain is better than a Democrat with two. - - - P.J. O'Rourke,1997
He doesn't die his hair - he's just prematurely orange. - - - Gerald Ford (about Ronald Reagan)
He doesn't die his hair, he bleaches his face. - - - Johnny Carson (about Ronald Reagan)
He has a chance to make somebody move over on Mount Rushmore. He's working for his place on the coins and the postage stamps. - - - Henry Graff (about Ronald Reagan, 1985)
I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness.
- - - Steve Martin
I think Nancy does most of his talking; you'll notice that she never drinks water when Ronnie speaks.
- - - Robin Williams (about Ronald Reagan)
In the heat of a political lifetime, he innocently squirrels away tidbits of misinformation and then, sometimes years later, casually drops them into his public discourse, like gum balls in a quiche.
- - - Lucy Howard (about Ronald Reagan 1985)
People say satire is dead. It's not dead; it's alive and living in the White House. He makes a Macy's Thanksgiving Day float look ridiculous. I think he's slowly but surely regressing into movies again. In his mind he's looking at dailies, playing dailies over and over. - - - Robin Williams (about Ronald Reagan, 1988)
The youthful sparkle in his eyes is caused by his contact lenses, which he keeps highly polished.
- - - Sheila Graham (about Ronald Reagan)
Washington could not tell a lie; Nixon could not tell the truth; Reagan cannot tell the difference.
- - - Mort Sahl

 

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Cherish your visions; cherish your ideals; cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.  - - - James Allen

But, O Sarah! if the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they loved, I shall always be near you; In the gladdest days and in the darkest nights . . . always, always, and if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, as the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by. Sarah do not mourn me dead; think I am gone and wait for thee, for we shall meet again.  - - - Major Sullivan Ballou, to his wife, a week before his death in 1861, during the Civil War

On Broadway it was still bright afternoon and the gassy air was almost motionless under the leaden spokes of sunlight, and sawdust footprints lay about the doorways of butcher shops and fruit stores. And the great, great crowd, the inexhaustible current of millions of every race and kind pouring out, pressing round, of every age, of every genius, possessors of every human secret, antique and future, in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence--I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally. The sidewalks were wider than any causeway; the street itself was immense, and it quaked and gleamed and it seemed...to throb at the last limit of endurance.- - - Saul Bellow "Seize the Day"

Son of man, keep not silent, forget not deeds of tyranny. Cry out at the disaster of a people, recount it unto your children and they unto theirs. From generation to generation the hordes swept in, ran wild and savage and there was no deliverance, valiance, and revolt. How the mighty are fallen, the great in spirit and stout of heart, walking to their death with a halo of eternity.- - - Yehuda L. Bialer (reference to the Holocaust)

There is one kind of laugh that I always did recommend; it looks out of the eye first with a merry twinkle, then it creeps down on its hands and knees and plays around the mouth like a pretty moth around the blaze of a candle, then it steals over into the dimples of the cheeks and rides around in those whirlpools for a while, then it lights up the whole face like the mellow bloom on a damask rose, then it swims up on the air, with a peal as clear and as happy as a dinner-bell, then it goes back again on gold tiptoes like an angel out for an airing, and it lies down on its little bed of violets in the heart where it came from.- - - Josh Billings

To see a hillside white with dogwood bloom is to know a particular ecstasy of beauty, but to walk the gray Winter woods and find the buds which will resurrect that beauty in another May is to partake of continuity.- - - Hal Borland, New York Times, November 28, 1948

The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory. - - - Truman Capote "Other Voices, Other Rooms"

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.- - - Rachel Carson, "The Silent Spring," 1962

Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.
- - - William Congreve

[In 1889] the last big tract of Indian land was declared open for settlement, in Oklahoma. The claimants and the speculators mounted their horses and lined up like trotters waiting for a starting gun. The itchy ones jumped the gun and were ever after known as Sooners--and Oklahoma was thereafter called the Sooner State.- - - Alistair Cooke, "America," 1973

What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.- - - Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator, 1890

The hair was a Vaseline cathedral, the mouth a touchingly uncertain sneer of allure. One, two-wham! Like a berserk blender the lusty young pelvis whirred and the notorious git-tar slammed forward with a jolt that symbolically deflowered a generation of teenagers and knocked chips off 90 million older shoulders. Then out of the half-melted vanilla face a wild black baritone came bawling in orgasmic lurches. Whu-huh-huh-huh f'the money! Two f'the show! Three t'git riddy naa GO CAAT GO!
- - - Brad Darrach, on Elvis Presley, Life, Winter, 1977

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.- - - James Matthew Barrie "Peter Pan"

They were ravished with its loveliness; a warm, soft-voiced spring-green landscape dotted with sassafras and scarlet-colored snakewood, smelling of wild strawberries and hart's tongue.- - - Marshall Fishwick, "Virginia: A New Look at the Old Dominion," 1959

Most marvelous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked for beauty, make flowers bloom even on the brow of the precipice.- - - Margaret Fuller

I have a most peaceable disposition. My desires are for a modest hut, a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, very fresh milk and butter, flowers in front of my window and a few pretty trees by my door. And should the good Lord wish to make me really happy, he will allow me the pleasure of seeing about six or seven of my enemies hanged upon those trees.- - - Heinrich Heine

When the moon shall have faded out from the sky, and the sun shall shine at noonday a dull cherry red, and the seas shall be frozen over, and the icecap shall have crept downward to the equator from either pole . . . when all the cities shall have long been dead and crumbled into dust, and all life shall be on the last verge of extinction on this globe; then, on a bit of lichen, growing on the bald rocks beside the eternal snows of Panama, shall be seated a tiny insect, preening its antennae in the glow of the worn-out sun, the sole survivor of animal life on this our earth -- a melancholy bug.  - - - W. J. Holland "The Math Book"

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.- - - Oliver Wendell Holmes, opinion, Towne v. Eisner, January 7, 1918

Melting pot Harlem--Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall...where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.  - - - Langston Hughes, Freedomways, Summer, 1963

Somewhere there was once a Flower, a Stone, a Crystal, a Queen, a King, a Palace, a Lover and his Beloved, and this was long ago, on an Island somewhere in the ocean 5,000 years ago....Such is Love, the ystic Flower of the Soul. This is the Center, the Self. - - - Carl Jung

It was cold out there, bitter, biting, cutting, piercing, hyperborean, marmoreal cold, and there were all these Minnesotans running around outdoors, happy as lambs in the spring. - - - Charles Kuralt, Dateline America, 1979

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than it be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.- - - Jack London, 1916
 
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
- - - Norman Maclean

A political convention is after all not a meeting of a corporation's board of directors; it is a fiesta, a carnival, a pig-rooting, horse-snorting, band-playing, voice-screaming medieval get-together of greed, practical lust, compromised idealism, career-advancement, meeting, feud, vendetta, conciliation, of rabble-rousers, fist fights (as it used to be), embraces, drunks (again as it used to be) and collective rivers of animal sweat. - - - Norman Mailer "Some Honorable Men: Political Conventions"

New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St. Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.  - - - Norman Mailer, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago," 1968

There are some people who read too much: The bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as others are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.  - - - H. L. Mencken

Hold on to your divine blush, your innate rosy magic, or end up brown. Once you're brown, you'll find out you're blue. As blue as indigo. And you know what that means. Indigo. Indigoing. Indigone.
- - - Tom Robbins

Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.- - - Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross, "On Death and Dying," 1969

In the dark colony of night, when I consider man's magnificent capacity for malice, madness, folly, envy, rage, and destructiveness, and I wonder whether we shall not end up as breakfast for newts and polyps, I seem to hear the muffled cries of all the words in all the books with covers closed. - - - Leo Rosten

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.  - - - Carl Sandburg "Poetry Considered"

But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?  - - - Logan Pearsall Smith, "More Trivia: Adjectives", 1921

If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries-the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top -- ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold-the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.
- - - Mark Twain

This is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and spirit. To see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and turn the solid city to a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature, and make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy.
- - - Mark Twain "Autobiography," 1924

When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.  - - - Denton Welch

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter's evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes always to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.  - - - Woodrow Wilson

A tearing wind last night. A flurry of red clouds, hard, a water colour mass of purple and black, soft as a water ice, then hard slices of intense green stone, blue stone and a ripple of crimson light. - - - Virginia Woolf, in her diary, August 17 1938