"Palimpsest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whom am I calling Matre? What are you? D'you know what you are?" He shook his finger in Le Brux's face. "You think you're a creator, but you're not. You're nothing but a palimpsest, the record of a single age. What are your works but one man's thumb-print on the face of time? Here I am giving you a chance to be a creator, to breed a live human that will carry on ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west, Love, Love alone can pore On thy dissolving score Of wild half-phrasings, Blotted ere writ, And double erasings. Of tunes full fit. Yea, Love, sole music-master blest, May read thy weltering palimpsest. To follow Time's dying melodies through, And never to lose the old in the new, And ever to solve the discords true— Love alone can do. And ever Love hears the poor-folks' crying, And ever Love hears the women's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... grave smile, the face on the shell seemed to look down with amused and permanent interest on Professor Lachsyrma struggling with the orthography of some forgotten scribe, and arguing with a friend on mutilated or corrupt passages in a Greek palimpsest. ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... was safe from observation, Asie unwrapped the papers with the care of a savant unrolling a palimpsest. After reading the instructions, she thought it wise to copy the lines intended for Lucien on a sheet of letter-paper; then she went down to Madame Nourrisson, to whom she talked while a little shop-girl went to fetch a cab from the Boulevard des Italiens. She thus extracted ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... into correspondent states of consciousness all the other modes of vibration of the ethereal medium, and grasp the keys of unlimited knowledge deciphering every secret wherever they go. The whole universe may be a palimpsest preserving the inscriptions of all deeds, and every soul may be a reagent gifted with the power to ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... of the backward look And folded wings of ashen gray And voice of echoes far away, The brazen covers of thy book; The weird palimpsest old and vast, Wherein thou hid'st the spectral past; Where, closely mingling, pale and glow The characters of joy and woe; The monographs of outlived years, Or smile-illumed or dim with tears, Green hills of life that slope to death, And haunts of home, whose ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... displayed their contents, which are usually seen only through a thick plate of protecting glass. In the one cabinet were a manuscript of the Latin poet Terence, of the fourth and fifth century; the celebrated palimpsest of Cicero de Republica, concealed under a version of St. Augustine's Commentary on the Psalms, the oldest Latin manuscript in existence; the famous Virgil of the fifth century, with the well-known portrait of Virgil; the Homilies of St. Gregory of Nazianzum; the folio ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... out by the great stress of the centuries, such long in-breeding, so many ages of persecution, so many manners and languages adopted, so many nationalities taken on! His soul must be like a palimpsest with the record of nation on nation. It was uncanny, this clinging to life; a race should be content to die out. And in him it had perhaps grown thus content. He foreshadowed its despair. He stood for ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the Roman form, could have been written in remote times, when there is reason to think that MSS. were written in uncial characters only, without stops, and with few or no divisions into words, sentences, or paragraphs. The palimpsest MS. examined by Dr. Barrett is in uncial characters, and is referred by him to the 6th or 7th century. Cic. de Republica, published by Angelo Mai, is assigned to much the same period. Small letters, and the distinctions above mentioned, were the invention of ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... and grander grows. At Gettysburg he bows his bleeding head; He spreads his arms where Chickamauga flows, As if to clasp old soldiers to his breast, Of South or North no matter which they be, Not thinking of what uniform they wore, His heart a palimpsest, Record on record of humanity, Where love is first ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... drew my eye to every paragraph celebrating Mrs. Amyot's last brilliant lecture on the influence of something upon somebody; and her own letters—she overwhelmed me with them—spared me no detail of the entertainment given in her honor by the Palimpsest Club of Omaha or of her reception at the University of Leadville. The college professors were especially kind: she assured me that she had never before met with such discriminating sympathy. I winced at the adjective, ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... to conduct the lawsuit of life. Then he confronts groups of facts which have crossed his path; the understanding, cultivated and enlarged, draws comparisons; the memories of youth reappear under the passions, like the traces of a palimpsest under the erasure; these memories form the bases of logic, and that which was a vision in the child's brain becomes a syllogism in the man's. Experience is, however, various, and turns to good or evil according to natural disposition. With the good it ripens, with ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... usually do anything with the "original"—does not bear me out in saying that it was a pleasant picture. I should like to believe that Jehoiakiin—for that was the singular name of the gentleman who sat by his hearthstone—had just received the Memphis "Palimpsest," fifteen days in advance of the date of its publication, and that his secretary was reading to him that monthly, and cutting its leaves as he read. I should like to have seen it in that year when Thales was learning astronomy in Memphis, and Necho ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Of parts, and gift of speech befitting A man of sense. Yet he mistakes His talents wondrously, and makes His thousand verses at a sitting. And troth, he makes them look their best: For, not content with palimpsest, He has them writ on royal vellum, Emboss'd and gilded, rubb'd and polish'd: But read 'em, and you wish abolish'd The privilege to make or sell 'em. You read them, and the man is quite Another man: no more polite— No more "the man ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... makeshift, temporary expedient, replacement, succedaneum; shift, pis aller[Fr], stopgap, jury rigging, jury mast, locum tenens, warming pan, dummy, scapegoat; double; changeling; quid pro quo, alternative. representative &c. (deputy) 759; palimpsest. price, purchase money, consideration, equivalent. V. substitute, put in the place of, change for; make way for, give place to; supply the place of, take the place of; supplant, supersede, replace, cut out, serve as a substitute; step into stand ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... must not omit to notice the fragments of an oration published by Baudi de Vesme in the Transactions of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Turin (1846). Those fragments, which were found in a palimpsest MS. of the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, were first published in 1822 by Angelo Mai, who was then disposed to attribute them to Symmachus (the elder), and to assign them to the early part of the fifth century. On reflection, ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... intention, when adverse gales drove my bark off the 'Fortunate Isles' of the Muses: and then other and more momentous interests prompted a different voyage, to firmer anchorage and a securer port. I have in vain tried to recover the lines from the palimpsest tablet of my memory: and I can only offer the introductory stanza, which had been committed to writing for the purpose of procuring a friend's judgment on the metre, as ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... those may be to blame, it is not my work to inquire. Some would grasp with gladness the hope that such chance might be proved a fact; others would not care to discern upon the palimpsest, covered but not obliterated, a credible tale of a perfect man revealing a perfect God: they are not true enough to desire that to be fact which would immediately demand the modelling of their lives upon a perfect idea, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... the drama's flood, omitting for a time what others have thought, and read as if the poem were a fresh manuscript found by you, and read with such avidity as scholars of the Renaissance knew when a palimpsest of Tacitus or Theocritus was found. Let your imagination, as well as the poet's, spread wings. Become creative yourself; for this is true: No one can rightly conceive any work of imagination and be himself unimaginative. Read and re-read, and at length, like the ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... down by my fire and examined my treasure. The first part of it—the great bulk of it—was parchment, and yellow with age. I scanned a leaf particularly and saw that it was a palimpsest. Under the old dim writing of the Yankee historian appeared traces of a penmanship which was older and dimmer still—Latin words and sentences: fragments from old monkish legends, evidently. I turned to the place indicated by my stranger and began ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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
... all-disgorging beast, wolf, or ogre, may have been derived from a view of Night as the all-swallower. But to disengage natural phenomena, mythically stated, from the human tangle of Marchen, to find natural phenomena in such a palimpsest as Perrault's courtly and artificial version of a French popular tale, is a delicate and dangerous task. In many stories a girl has three balls—one of silver, one of gold, one of diamond—which she offers, in succession, as bribes. This is a perfectly natural invention. ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... keen curiosity concerning these homes and gardens, and the whole panorama that opened before her, as the little steamer puffed up the river. She longed to penetrate below the surface and decipher the strange palimpsest of human life. What scenes, what tragedies, what comedies, those bright houses and demure little villas concealed. It was not exactly consoling to remember how small her own immediate difficulties were ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... feel it quicken in the dark sometimes; then mark, be reverent, be obedient,— for those dumb motions of imperfect life are oracles of vital Deity attesting the Hereafter. Let who says 'The soul's a clean white paper', rather say, a palimpsest, a prophet's holograph defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's,— the Apocalypse by a Longus! poring on which obscure text, we may discern perhaps some fair, fine trace of what was written once, some off-stroke of an alpha and omega ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... his remotest forefathers; a ghost which comes in youth when these ancient etchings are easier to decypher, being not yet overscored by fresh personal experiences. What is human life but a never-ending palimpsest? ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... canvases have a rare, mysterious power of evocation. He was a visionary, this Sandro Filipepi, pupil of the mercurial Fra Lippo Lippi and the brothers Pollajuolo, and his inward vision must have been something more than paint and pattern and subject. A palimpsest may be discerned by the imaginative—or, let us say, fanciful, since Coleridge long ago set forth the categories—whose secrets are not to be deciphered easily, yet are something more than those portrayed by the artist ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... have been based, and separate features specially emphasized, by individual psychoanalysts. Thus Sadger considers that, beneath the male individual loved by the invert, a female is concealed, and that this fact may be revealed by psychoanalysis which removes the upper layer of the psychic palimpsest; he believes that this disposition of the invert is favored by a frequent mixture of male and female traits in his near relatives; originally, "it is not man whom the homosexual man loves and desires but man and woman ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and have their fall; the brass That held their glories moulders in its turn. Hard granite rots like an uprooted weed, And ever on the palimpsest of earth Impatient Time rubs out the word he writ. But one thing makes the years its pedestal, Springs from the ashes of its pyre, and claps A skyward wing above its epitaph— The will of ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... were gone; their places filled by five-storey brick or 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 ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... doubt 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 everything as genuine, was of opinion that ...
— Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century • John Wilson Ross
... archaeologist finds somewhat to noise abroad. His, indeed, is a scholarship which is essentially necrophagous. For consider, what would become of it, if a necropolis, for instance, did not yield somewhat of nourishment,—a limb, a torso, a palimpsest, or even an earthen lamp, a potsherd, or a coin? I rail not at these scholarly grave-diggers because I can not interest myself in their work; that were unwise and unfair. But truly, I abominate this business of 'cashing,' as it were, the ruins and remains, the ashes and dust, of our ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... out, 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 overscored with interesting ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... nephew of Julius II., beautifully illuminated by Julio Clovio, a scholar of Giulio Romano. I never saw anything more exquisite than these paintings. Amongst the most curious of the literary treasures we saw are a manuscript of some of St. Augustine's works, written upon a palimpsest of Cicero's 'De Republica;' this treatise was brought to light by Maii; the old Latin was as nearly erased as possible, but by the application of gall it has been brought out faintly, but enough to be made out, and completely read: Henry VIII.'s ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville |
