"The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said - could it not? - of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kid of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely recalled, as the comma - unless it be breath itself?" -- Pico Iyer, 'In Praise of the Humble Comma,' In Short edited by Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones. Norton, 1996.

'The Philosopher's Garden' at the Gallery of Modern Art. consists of photos by Robin Gillanders of Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden, Little Sparta, and the garden at Ermenonville, the latter illustrating Rousseau's Reveries du promeneur solitaire.

"The taste for solitude and contemplation grew up in my heart along with the expansive and tender feelings whichare best able tonourish it. Noise and turmoil constrain and quench them, peace and quiet revive and intensify them.I need tranquility if I am to love." (Tenth Promenade)

“The smaller you are, the bigger Christmas is. Underneath the Christmas tree, Christmas is vast. It is a green jungle with red apples and sad, peaceful angels, twirling around on cotton thread, keeping watch over the entrance to the primeval forest. In the glass balls, the primeval forest is neverending. Christmas is a time when you feel absolutely safe, thanks to the Christmas tree.”-- The opening lines of ‘Christmas,’ from Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson, last Friday’s Afternoon Reading on Radio 4, available on the Internet until this Friday.

"Emerson and Carlyle met briefly when they were comparatively young, and had an immediate rapport. They sustained this friendship for years via letters; then Emerson made another trip over, and they found they didn't like each other at all. Emerson found Carlyle a savage misanthropic terror; Carlyle found Emerson full of moonshine and endlessly talking (one knows the type)."

(from 'Books and Personalities,' Butterflies and Wheels Notes Archive, 17 September 2004).

Discovered while cataloguing a 1998 NIDA leaflet on inhalants:

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody thought."