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Arthur Symons

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Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch twig for the castigation of offenders.
--
An Introduction to the Study of Browning, preface (1906)

 
Arthur Symons

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I like to summarize what I regard as the pedestal-smashing messages of Darwin's revolution in the following statement, which might be chanted several times a day, like a Hare Krishna mantra, to encourage penetration into the soul: Humans are not the end result of predictable evolutionary progress, but rather a fortuitous cosmic afterthought, a tiny little twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life, which, if replanted from seed, would almost surely not grow this twig again, or perhaps any twig with any property that we would care to call consciousness.

 
Stephen Jay Gould
 

"Noelle's Treasure Tale" is based on the historical fact that three Spanish galleons full of treasure sunk off Florida's treasure coast and have never been recovered. I have a beach house on the Treasure Coast, and I'm out there with my snorkel looking for the treasure.

 
Gloria Estefan
 

'I can repeat the very words you were saying:
"Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build."
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor?
You couldn't care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.

 
Robert Frost
 

I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.

 
Djuna Barnes
 

Vereker’s secret, my dear man — the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were strung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet.

 
Henry James
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