[A formula for answering controversial letters -- without even reading the letters:] Dear Sir (or Madame): You may be right.

Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent - slimy, sneaking and abominable.

Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

If there was ever a dissenter from the national optimismit was surely Edgar Allan Poe--without question the bravest and mostoriginal, if perhaps also the least orderly and judicious, of all the critics that we have produced.