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July 12, 2008
The latest random annotations
"...They were mostly 'His Master's Voice' and 'Columbia'; the latter, however, although easily pronounced, had only letters, and the pensive doggy was a winner.(...) It took me a least a decade to realize that 'His Master's voice' means what it does: that a dog is listening here to the voice of its owner. I thought it was listening to the recording of its own barking, for I somehow took the phonograph's amplifier for a mouth piece too, and since dogs run before their owners, this label all my childhood meant to me the voice of the dog announcing his master's approach."
--from the essay "Spoils of War", so far the only of Joseph Brodsky's writings I have enjoyed, a poignant account of his childhood and youth in the USSR and the meaning of foreign objects left behind by Americans after the WWII in his life.
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"Dearer to me than a host of base truths
is the delusion that enobles us." -- AS Pushkin
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"il n'y a de bonheur que dans les voies communes" - Chateaubriand
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"I hear from people who have seen you that you are becoming stout, optimistic and genial - in other words, Americanized. I believe that I had already noticed traces of this in your letters, and I'm not sure I entirely approve."
Edmund Wilson's letter to Vladimir Nabokov, 14 Jan 1946
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"Don't let the smallest chance slip by; you never know until you try."
"If you're a salesman worth the name at all, you can sell razors to a billiard ball."
"The salesman who will use his brains will spare himself a world of pains."
"Well kept hands that please the sight seize the trade and hold it tight, but bitten nails and grubby claws well may give the buyer pause."
maxims from Montague Egg's Salesman Handbook (the other Dorothy L Sayers detective)
Posted by claudia
Comments
Posted by tristan forward at July 13, 2008 02:28 PM