Pipistrello's Commonplace Book

'I was wondering whether he could have buried something. Of course, when people bury treasure nowadays they do it in the Post Office bank. But there are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them.' Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Three Gables", The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes , 1927

"You can make what claims you will about the psychological nuance of Proust or the narrative scope of Tolstoy, but you can't argue that Mrs. Christie fails to please. Her books are tremendously satisfying ... But I think there is another reason they please – a reason that is at least as important, if not more so – and that is that in Agatha Christie's universe everyone eventually gets what they deserve." Amor Towles, Rules of Civility , 2011

What shocks me is that students, academics, men of letters, should display what I had thought was an essentially uneducated inability to differentiate between a disputation and a quarrel. The real objection to this sort of thing is that it is all a distraction from the issue. You waste on calling me liar and hypocrite time you ought to have spent on refuting my position. Even if your main purpose was to gratify resentment, you have gone about it the wrong way. Any man would rather be called names than proved wrong. C. S. Lewis, letter to the editors, Delta: The Cambridge Literary Magazine , February 1961