How do we know anything? How do we know the wall we’re looking at is white? What is white?

—Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 2003.

"Somebody really ought to write a book about the funny conversations of drunks."
—Robert Joseph Casey, The Black Hills and Their Incredible Characters, 1949, p. 42.

"The poem is not the sum of the impressions, as a heap of diamond dust is the sum of its shining particles; nor is the poet merely a sensitized medium for their reception and transmission.  Beneath the poem lie also innumerable blendings and fusings of impressions, brought about below the level of conscious mental processes."
—John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, 1927

Certainty #50:

"The only certainty is that climate will change again one day."
—Peter Haggett, Geography, 2001

 

Gary Barwin has spotted three varieties of elusive conjoined ampersands.  Here's our favorite:

The sign on the Spiritualist's door read: "Please tap loudly or ring a bell."

"I know it, somewhere here there are marvelous things." —Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten