Well, I started writing everything. I wrote a Saturday Evening Post story and an American Magazine story and a Collier’s Story, and some sort of a western story, and science fiction and mystery stories. I sent them around. The science fiction story sold and the others didn’t, so after several repetitions then, I just wrote science fiction. It took me about a year before I was selling. — "An Interview with R. A. Lafferty" (1983), D. Schweitzer “L’Avare” is a 1958 vignette tha

I began to try to write in about 1959 and went a year or so before my first sale . . . My life has been mostly interior and that interior very shallow. . . I am forever a Catholic, a bachelor, a political independent, a lone badger (lone wolves are a legend, they are always in groups, but even the bachelor badger digs himself a hole and spends most of his time in it). So it stands. There isn't much of a biography. Most of my life I forgot to live. — letter to Damon Knight, Se

Now, the art of rhetoric being available for the enforcing either of truth or falsehood, who will dare to say that truth in the person of its defenders is to take its stand unarmed against falsehood? — Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (De doctrina christiana), Book IV, Chapter 2, §3 There are the ultimate in evil who keep the venom and change the Name of the Snake. Pope Francis had a knack for getting headlines. He once remarked that he would baptize an extraterrestrial who

This is the crux of Herder’s thesis, that language is constitutive of reflection. And at the same time, this shows how a constitutive theory of language breaks out of the bounds of the enframing. We can’t explain language by the function it plays within a pre- or extralinguistically conceived framework of human life, because language through constituting the semantic dimension transforms any such framework, giving us new feelings, new desires, new goals, new relationships, an

perfect (adj.) — early 15c., classical correction of Middle English parfit “flawless, ideal” (c. 1300), also “complete, full, finished, lacking in no way” (late 14c.), from Old French parfit “finished, completed, ready” (11c.), from Latin perfectus “completed, excellent, accomplished, exquisite,” past participle of perficere “accomplish, finish, complete,” from per “completely” + combining form of facere “to make, to do” (from PIE root dhe- “to set, put”). — Online Etymology

A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it. It has been said, that a man of wit could not resist it; that it was a voluntary deviation from sense. But I believe he indulged himself in it, as a practice of the age, to show his reading or his memory, and to divert by producing something unexpected. — Samuel Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare (1765) THE ANGEL. Yes. You are all now under judgment, in common with the rest of the E

“Let some sick world be brought,” said Easterwine, as though to heal it with his shaping hands. He disappeared then. In 2018, Kevin Cheek started a thread on Facebook's East of Laughter asking whether Epiktistes was related to Epictetus, the Greek philosopher of the 1st and early 2nd centuries. I’ll address that first: does Epiktistes have anything to do with Epictetus? No. That’s silly. I’ll try again. What Epiktistes has to do with Epictetus is that both names might look at

Lafferty’s knack for weird and wonderful words is a big part of the joy of reading him. His stories don’t just tell—they sing, hum, crackle, and bang with the pleasure of language. Some of that magic lies in the odd, rare, and sometimes completely made-up words he slips in, all part of his linguistic mischief. One of my favorites? Gynotikolobomassophile—his coinage for someone who loves women with fat ankles. For anyone tracking down these linguistic curiosities, a good place