One of Melville’s grandfathers took part in the Boston Tea Party. As did one of Edith Wharton’s great-grandfathers.

I hope I never get so old I get religious. Quoth Ingmar Bergman.

Raymond Carver died of lung cancer.

Beethoven, Gluck, Schubert, and Brahms are buried in the same Vienna cemetery. Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau are buried in the same one in Concord.

It is later than you know. Printed Baudelaire onto the face of his clock--after having broken off its hands.

If it were up to me, I would have wiped my behind with his last decree. Said Mozart--after a demand by the Archbishop of Salzburg for more brevity in his church compositions.

George Santayana, reading Moby Dick: In spite of much skipping, I have got stuck in the middle.

Robert Herrick so admired Ben Jonson that he regularly spoke of him as Saint Ben.

Virtually every second book in every library in the world is irreparably deteriorating because of brittle paper and acid content.

Morningless sleep. Epicurus called death.

Leonardo. Michelangelo. Botticelli. Raphael. Watteau. Claude. Van Dyck. Guido Reni. Pontormo. Poussin. Donatello. Reynolds. Being but a handful among artists who never married.

Baudelaire, twice--in print--called upon Poe as a kind of patron saint to intercede for him during a prayer.

Malcolm Lowry, seemingly serious himself, told a friend he had once prayed to Kafka: And he answered my prayer.

You have to read fifteen hundred books in order to write one. Flaubert put it.

August 15, 1967, René Magritte died on.

The novels of David Markson, who briefly before he died had a Twitter account, - it saddens me to think they go unread, they will one day be forgotten.