"I ought before this to have reply’d to your very kind invitation into Cumberland. With you and your Sister I could gang anywhere. But I am afraid whether I shall ever be able to afford so desperate a Journey. Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments, as any of your Mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The Lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the unnumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the Town, the Watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; – life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt & mud, the Sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old Book stalls, parsons cheap’ning books, coffee houses, steams of soup from kitchens, the pantomimes, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade, all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impells me into night walks about the crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much Life. – All these emotions must be strange to you. So are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes? –
My attachments are all local, purely local –. I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry & books) to groves and vallies. – The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved, old tables, streets, squares, when I have sunned myself, my old school, – these are my mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you, I should pity you, did I not know, that the Mind will make friends of any thing. Your sun & moon and skies and hills & lakes affect me no more, or scarcely come to me in more venerable characters, than as a gilded room with tapestry and tapers, where I might live with handsome visible objects." - Charles Lamb, 1801-01-30, letter to William Wordsworth in The Letters of Charles Lamb, by way of Pandæmonium by Humphrey jennings.
"We are great at suspending one reality for a new one. It is part of the success of Hatsune Miku, a popular Japanese pop star who draws masses of rocking youths even though she is a mere hologram. She is a computer-generated 3-D projection with a female persona and a synthesized voice, who dances and sings to a live band, towering high above her audience since she is not limited by human size. Her concerts sell out in a matter of minutes. The public sings along with her and responds to her sexy moves as if she were real.
To insist, as neo-atheists like to do, that all that matters is empirical reality, that facts trump beliefs, is to deny humanity its hopes and dreams." - Frans De Waal, 2013, The Bonobo and the Atheist.
"And after all, a human male can be sexually aroused by a supernormal caricature of a female, even though he is well aware that it is a drawing on two-dimensional paper, with unnaturally exaggerated features, and a fraction of normal size." - Richard Dawkins, 2024, The Genetic Book of the Dead.
"A novel according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better." - Charles Darwin, 1881, Recollections of the Development of my Mind and Character, printed in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, by way of Pandæmonium by Humphrey Jennings.
"We rede that in Englonde was a kinge that had a concubyne, whose name was Rose, and for her graete bowte he cleped hir Rose-a-munde, that is to saye, Rose of the Worlde; for him thought that she passed al women in bewte. It befel that she died, and was buried whyle the kinge was absent, and whanne he came ayen, for grete love that he had to hyr, he would se the bodie in the graue, and whanne the graue was opened there sat an orrible tode upon hyr breste, bytween hyr teetys, and a foule adder bigirt hyr body aboute the midle, and she stank so that the kyng, ne non other, might stonde to se the orrible sight. Thanne the kynge dyde shette agen the graue, and did write these two veersis upon the graue,
Hie jacet in tumba Rosa-mundi non Rosamunda;
Non redolet, sed olet, quæ redolere solet." - Author unknown, 1493, A Compendious Treatise Dialogue of Dives and Pauper, by way of Typographia (1825) by T.C. Hansard, page 115.