'I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations.'

Academics who think of the internet as a place to dump announcements and CFPs are the worst.

Now that I'm sure you're a serious person I certainly do want to know how we can solve all our problems.

Please, tell me more about evolution. I want to feel scientific too!

Oh! Opinions! Well aren't you special!

It's odd how you only see one star, and then you see the rest.

You kind of suspect that people who do text-critical scholarship on Thoreau are extra eager to use the word 'leaf'.

Richardson quotes a salutary thought from the first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers:

'though nature's laws are more immutable than any despots yet to our daily life they rarely seem rigid, but permit us to relax with license in summer weather'

Circumstances change, are various; laws are known, their effects experienced, only ever in circumstances. Circumstances are usual, but not uniform.

Usually usual, at least.

Quotation is a way of framing your relation to what you quote (and to what you don't).