Overbury's Characters

'There were people throwing pies at one another.'

'…to replace a realism based on characters and interiority with one based on systems.'

Wow, Thoreau really went ham on that Flint dude.

If you're gonna own a store, you might as well stock ice cream so you can eat it for free, otherwise what's the point of owning a store?

Maybe the most surprising thing about Robert Shields' diary (a page of which is here) is that it contains anything like impressions, anecdotes, or opinions at all.

'I don't leave town. I haven't left town since 1985, to visit my brother in Tennessee. I don't like to be away overnight, because it gets me behind. If I travel to Walla Walla to do shopping, it puts me behind in the diary. I have to take notes all the time, and I get back and it takes me a day to catch up with the notes. So I avoid going out. I avoid being away.'

'The lyrics are so filthy that I can-not enclose them in this letter.'

(And a concerned mother: 'Is there perhaps a subliminal type of perversion involved?'.)

Overstatement is not a way of saying more, but a way of saying too much.

More should learn, and practice, understatement.