"Palimpsest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... from the United States, now is the time. The item is the repeal of the Underwood tariff. Accustomed for life to unpleasant sensations from printed pages, his face gives no sign of emotion. Swiftly he reads through, flings the paper down and looks up. At once he rises, glaring coldly at the Crerar palimpsest on the wall. Again that Mona Lisa exporting smile, as ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... yon wight Suffenus known to thee Fairly for wit, free talk, urbanity, The same who scribbles verse in amplest store— Methinks he fathers thousands ten or more Indited not as wont on palimpsest, 5 But paper-royal, brand-new boards, and best Fresh bosses, crimson ribbands, sheets with lead Ruled, and with pumice-powder all well polished. These as thou readest, seem that fine, urbane Suffenus, goat-herd mere, or ditcher-swain 10 Once more, such horrid change is there, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... every country-town a large washing-cistern is always provided by the authorities for public use, and, at all hours of the day, the picturesque figures of the peasants of every age, from the old hag, whose skin is like a brown and crumpled palimpsest, (where Anacreontic verses are overwritten by a dull, monkish sermon,) to the round, dark-eyed girl, with broad, straight back and shining hair, may be seen gathered around it,—their heads protected from the sun by their folded tovaglia, their skirts knotted up behind, and their waists ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... on the authenticity of these words; they believe they were actually written by Salustius; the fact is, they have not the slightest suspicion of forgery; under which circumstance, they had no other alternative but to regard the manuscript as a palimpsest, with everything erased except these words, which they believed ought also to have been expunged, as appertaining to the previous, and not the existing MS., and which remained through the negligence of the transcriber. Pichena, accepting ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... Babylon, Tyre and Sidon; from the trenches of Tel el Armana; by the key words of the Rosetta stone and the black but speaking face of the Moabite stone; from newly discovered papyri and parchment, and the mystic page of cracked and crumpled palimpsest; from the rocks of earth, the depths of the sea and the heights of heaven—and from the latest discoveries of science, there arise amazing witnesses, which speak in tones that cannot be hushed, with facts that cannot be denied, and bear testimony beyond all possibility ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... therefore, the annexed provinces present a strangely complex patchwork and oft-repeated palimpsest, civilization after civilization overlapping each other. If Alsace-Lorraine has produced no Titan either in literature or art, she yet shows a ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... it as the director of a huge trust might have spoken. But, as he passed on to talk of what he thought would result from the Communist method of tackling that problem, and spoke of the eventual disappearance of political parties, I felt I was trying to read a kind of palimpsest of the ...
— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome
... may become a palimpsest. 'I will write upon him My new name.' 'Ye are an epistle of Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... stone ones, with Post Offices to match. Occasionally some overlooked fragment of the past still cleaved to a town, and marked it for an old acquaintance, but often one had to get a mile away and look back on a place—as one holds a palimpsest up against the light—to identify the long overlaid lines of the beginnings. Each town supplied the big farming country behind it, and each town school carried the Union Jack on a flagstaff in its playground. So far as one could understand, ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... though I frankly admit that the difficulties of the text, as given in the rough by Signor de Tivoli, seem to me insuperable, and that his readings, though ingenious, cannot in my opinion be accepted as absolutely certain. He himself describes the MS. as a palimpsest, deliberately defaced by Michael Angelo, from which the words originally written have to be recovered in many cases by a process of conjecture. That the style of the restoration is thoroughly Michael Angelesque, ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... All alike were carefully closed, and with all the delicate costliness at command; some with simple tiles of baked clay, many with slabs of marble, enriched by fair inscriptions: marble taken, in some cases, from older pagan tombs—the inscription sometimes a palimpsest, the new epitaph being woven into the faded letters ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... for instance, how in "Chance" we have one layer of personal receptivity after another; each one, as in a sort of rich palimpsest of overlaid impressions, making the material under our hands thicker, fuller, more significant, more symbolic, more underscored and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... their literary merits and in the merits of their several parts, for they have been successively rewritten at different periods, receiving always something of the color, belief, and adornment which belonged to the writer's time; but under all may be dimly traced, as in a palimpsest, the remote pagan original. At their best they embody a lofty and touching poetry very subtle and significant, as when we read of Bran's summoning by a visitant of supernatural beauty to the isles of undying delight, where a thousand years are but as a day; his return with a companion ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... was because he had identified her once more with the long-lost, long-sought beauty of years long gone—the girl he had seen in the cheap vaudeville theater. This slip of memory had uncovered another memory. He had corrected the palimpsest and recalled her as the Miss Webling whom he had met in London. She had given him the same start then as now, and, as he recalled it, she had snubbed him rather vigorously. So he had kept his distance. But the proffer of the ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... Latinorum, etc., pl. 14, and in Steffens, Lateinische Palaeographie{2}, pl. 12b), in the Vienna, Paris, and Lateran manuscripts of Livy, in the Codex Corbeiensis of the Gospels, and here and there in the palimpsest manuscript of Cicero's De Re ...
— A Sixth-Century Fragment of the Letters of Pliny the Younger • Elias Avery Lowe and Edward Kennard Rand
... mercy is not the same everywhere. In this way the ideas of our race have been subverted. In this way we have made tyrants, bigots, and inquisitors. In this way the brain of man has become a kind of palimpsest upon which, and over the writings of Nature, superstition has scribbled her countless lies. Our great trouble is that most teachers are dishonest. They teach as certainties those things concerning which they entertain doubts. They do not say, "We think this is so." but "We ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll |
