Dive in, splash around, skim and dip and spout about the latest quotations, metaphors, words and, of course, triologisms. You’ll feel better for it!

A quote to note

Drawing on thousands of sparkling, moving and inspiring quotations amassed during decades of attentive reading. To delight your mind and spirit and improve your presentations beyond belief.

The loss of safe space

The loss of safe space

A piercing definition of where authoritarian regimes can end up: an all-controlling totalitarian nightmare, regardless of the underlying ideology. ...

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How to host house guests

How to host house guests

A charming insight into the levels of luxury which could be visited upon an upper echelon house guest in the early 20th century.  Will endeavour to...

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Spoons for swine

Spoons for swine

A revealing aspect of Svetlana Alexievich's interviews with Russian people, conducted first in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, and...

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Metaphorically speaking

More marvelous metaphors on Mondays … Monday, metaphor day.

A booming voice

A booming voice

A novel pair of similes to convey a loud, hard voice, including those weighted final syllables.   "Congratulations!" said the father, his voice...

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As if …

As if …

Flying a tiny, fragile aircraft on a reconnaissance sortie, Saint-Exupéry finds the rudder has frozen, and nearly gives himself a heart attack...

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As indispensable as …

As indispensable as …

A life-line for a Second World War pilot was the rubber tube.  Saint-Exupéry's account vividly describes the physicality and encumbrance of flying a...

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Triologisms

Bringing you pithy, evocative imagery in the form of three-legged microcosms of meaning. Updated on Tuesdays … Tuesday, triologism day!  You’ll never see this day of the week in the same way again.

Wind-tousled sky

Wind-tousled sky

This is from a few lines of Seamus Heaney's prose in which he imagines how Philip Larkin might have approached writing his own version of The Divine...

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Wedge-shadowed gardens

Wedge-shadowed gardens

Two superb triologisms in a few lines of Larkin - I like his wedge-shadowed gardens and then the Brontean empyrean which follows.  I part thick...

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Stone-smooth sky

Stone-smooth sky

This caught my eye simply because I can't recall having seen such a sky, and can scarcely imagine it.  Clouded, but that doesn't align with...

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Sea-clap music

Sea-clap music

Seamus Heaney's comment on a poem by Sylvia Plath conveys something of the shore-scouring slaps and soughs of it: And it is indeed a pleasure to...

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Rain-sodden gallowglasses

Rain-sodden gallowglasses

Seamus Heaney describes an Ulster of: ... hill-forts, cattle-raids, and rain-sodden gallowglasses where Hugh O'Neill was born and to which, after...

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Mote-lit stillness

Mote-lit stillness

Commenting on some poems by Edwin Muir, Seamus Heaney says: They return us, a little too unscathed, to the mote-lit stillness of the cradle and the...

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Words

Sharing words that sparkle, appeal, intrigue or otherwise grab me, including in other languages. And adoring alliteration, words are added on Wednesdays… Wednesday, word day. See you back here then.

A deceit, a descent and a parliament

A deceit, a descent and a parliament

As you may know, I have a soft spot for imaginative collective nouns, and although I'd come across 'parliament' for owls, and love the whooshing...

Lauzengier

Lauzengier

Lauzengier (also 'lauzenger') appears in the songs of French troubadours.  An old Occitan word but surely one which it may be timely to pluck from...

Gulch it down

Gulch it down

Mervyn Peake uses Rabelaisian vocabulary to describe the gargantuan appetites and appearance of Swelter, the castle cook in his Gormenghast trilogy....

Mummarella

Mummarella

You would know the 'true' octopus if you saw it, wouldn't you? Reading a book about Mediterranean seafood, Luiz learned that according to an...

Ullage of sunflower

Ullage of sunflower

Something about this word that you can roll around the mouth like a good swig of wine or cognac, the removal of which would result in its ullage in...

Cragfast

Cragfast

Stuck?  In a tight corner?  No going forward ... or back?  Call yourself Cragfast. A sheep cornered on a crag, to starve in the absence of rescue....

I find it moving that no literary text is utterly original, no literary text is completely unique, that it stems from previous texts, built on quotations and misquotations, on the vocabularies fashioned by others and transformed through imagination and use.  Writers must find consolation in the fact that there is no very first story and no last one.  Our literature reaches further back than the beginnings of our memory permits us, and further into the future than our imagination allows us to conceive, but that must be the only barrier.  

Source: Alberto Manguel, The City of Words, CBC Massey Lecture Series (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2007), p. 139

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