Weekend Words: Half
This week, Hyperallergic’s Laura C. Mallonee reported that the Friedenstein Foundation in Gotha, Germany, is seeking the upper half of the 16th-century painting “Bowl With the Head of John the Baptist” by Lucas Cranach, which was sawn in two by an art dealer in 1936.
This week, Hyperallergic’s Laura C. Mallonee reported that the Friedenstein Foundation in Gotha, Germany, is seeking the upper half of the 16th-century painting “Bowl With the Head of John the Baptist” by Lucas Cranach, which was sawn in two by an art dealer in 1936.
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.
—Charlotte Whitton
Alice laughed. “There is no use trying,” she said; “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
—Lewis Carroll
At half-past three a single bird
Unto a silent sky
Propounded but a single term
Of cautious melody.
—Emily Dickinson, “At Half Past Three a Single Bird”
If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.
—Katharine Hepburn
Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left. Think it over… no more syphilis, no more clap, no more typhoid… antibiotics have taken half the tragedy out of medicine.
—Louis-Ferdinand Celine
I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass
—Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”
The half is greater than the whole.
—Hesiod
Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.
—T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party
Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
—Bertrand Russell
Mankind decays so soon,
We’are scarce our fathers’ shadows cast at noon,
Only death adds t’our length: nor are we grown
In stature to be men, till we are none.
—John Donne, “An Anatomy of the World”
Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there — I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.
—Andy Warhol
The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.
—Samuel Johnson
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
—Groucho Marx
