Pseudonymous Quotes

“*Appendix usually means "small outgrowth from large intestine," but in this case it means "additional information accompanying main text." Or are those really the same things? Think carefully before you insult this book.”

“Please be SILENT and LISTEN.I am the SCHOOLMASTERand you are in the CLASSROOM.Just like ELEVEN PLUS TWO equalsTWELVE PLUS ONE,And even a FUNERAL can be REAL FUN,You will find my DICTIONARYis quite INDICATORY.If you want to read my story, just look...THEN UNREAD.”

“The name of this book is mysterious.”

“In the same essay, Said (who is reviewing Peter Stansky and William Abrams, co-authors obsessed with the Blair/Orwell distinction) congratulates them on their forceful use of tautology:This is rather extraordinary. Orwell did indeed meet Garrett in Liverpool in 1936, and was highly impressed to find that he knew him already through his pseudonymous writing—under the name Matt Lowe—for John Middleton Murry’s Adelphi. As he told his diary:Thus the evidence that supposedly shames Orwell by contrast is in fact supplied by—none other than Orwell himself! This is only slightly better than the other habit of his foes, which is to attack him for things he quotes other people as saying, as if he had instead said them himself. (The idea that a writer must be able to ‘afford’ to write is somewhat different and, as an idea, is somewhat—to use a vogue term of the New Left—‘problematic’. If it were only the bourgeois who were able to write, much work would never have been penned and, incidentally, Orwell would never have met Garrett in the first place.)”

“One of the most amazing and perplexing features of mainstream Christianity is that seminarians who learn the historical-critical method in their Bible classes appear to forget all about it when it comes time for them to be pastors. They are taught critical approaches to Scripture, they learn about the discrepancies and contradictions, they discover all sorts of historical errors and mistakes, they come to realize that it is difficult to know whether Moses existed or what Jesus actually said and did, they find that there are other books that were at one time considered canonical but that ultimately did not become part of Scripture (for example, other Gospels and Apocalypses), they come to recognize that a good number of the books of the Bible are pseudonymous (for example, written in the name of an apostle by someone else), that in fact we don't have the original copies of any of the biblical books but only copies made centuries later, all of which have been altered. They learn all of this, and yet when they enter church ministry they appear to put it back on the shelf. For reasons I will explore in the conclusion, pastors are, as a rule, reluctant to teach what they learned about the Bible in seminary.”

“Cassandra, when you want to speak to me, you should say 'Excuse me, Mrs. Johnson.' Then wait until you get my attention.""Excuse me, Mrs. Johnson. Do I have your attention now?”

“But remember what I said about forgetting what I said?”

“Some secrets are meant to be known- but once known you can never forget them.”

“...books were better than travel.”