<sdsi: quotations>

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen.

Of Ulysses: The scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges.

Scratch the Christian and you will find the pagan -- spoiled.

To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life -- this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.

Scratch a lover, and you find a foe.

Really the writer doesn't want success.... He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall -- Kilroy was here* -- that somebody a hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

Those who'll play with cats must expect to be scratched.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,/ Scratched his head and kept on thinking;/ Miniver coughed and called it fate,/ And kept on drinking.

There was a young belle of old Natchez/ whose garments were always in patchez./ When comment arose/ On the state of her clothes,/ She drawled, When Ah itchez, Ah scratchez!

There's a whining at the threshold--/ There's a scratching at the floor--/ To work! To work! in Heaven's name!/ The wolf is at the door!

A city for sale and soon to perish if it finds a buyer!

 

<who said what & when>

- Samuel Lover, Handy Andy (1842

- Virginia Woolf, letter to Lytton Strachey (1922)

- Israel Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto (1892)

- Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden (1870)

- Dorothy Parker, "Ballade of the Great Weariness," Enough Rope (1927)

- William Faulkner, Faulkner in the University (1959)i

- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605-1615)

- Edward Arlington Robinson, Miniver Cheevy (1910)

- Ogden Nash, I'm a Stranger Here Myself (1938)

- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, In This Our World (1893)

- Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus), The War with Jugurtha (ca. 41 BCE)

*army saying, wwii

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