Kirk Norton

“Popularity is neither fame nor greatness. A king (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own. He merely wields the lever of state, which a child, an idiot or a madman can do. It is the office, not the man we gaze at. Any one else in the same situation would be just as much as object of abject curiosity.

- The Indian Juggler”
― William Hazlitt, William Hazlitt: Essays

“As he hurried toward the exit, he passed between the lobby’s two walls of soaring bookcases, which proudly displayed Random House classics dating back to the early 1900s, when cofounders Bennett Cerf and Donald S. Klopfer founded this company as a small reprint publisher. The founders’ literary tastes were so varied and diverse as to seem almost “random,” and they named their publishing venture accordingly.”
― Dan Brown, The Secret of Secrets

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”
― William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White

“It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The color is repellent, almost revolting; a shouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”
― Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper: Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Seminal Work on Gender and Mental Health