"Shocking as it sounds, healthy skin doesn't really need any additional moisture."
—Julie Gabriel, The Green Beauty Guide (2008)

An illustration from an 1888 issue of Scribner's magazine.

An illustration from an 1895 issue of Scribner's magazine.

"Consciousness manifests itself indubitably in man and therefore, glimpsed in this one flash of light, it reveals itself as having a cosmic extension and consequently as being aureoled by limitless prolongations in space and time."*
—Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom, The Ascension Factor (1988)

An illustration from an 1875 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "Then I sprang over the yawning chasm."

Jonathan quips, "Always bring your trombone when springing over yawning chasms!"

After fully 27 years, a rhetorical question gets answered during the concert film A Diamond in the Mind.

Simon: [directing a lyric from the "The Reflex" to his keyboardist] "So why-y-y don't you use it?"
Nick: "I'm saving it for later."

"What surprised us, and may surprise you now that you see it, is the amount of effort you spend protecting your 'I'm great' turf."
—Tribal Leadership (2012)

A surrealist illustration from a 1906 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.  The caption reads: "A tornado that lifted me off my feet and flung me headlong to the pavement."

We say without irony that we suspected this all along:

"Symbolic fiction and spectral apparition are thus two sides of the same coin."
—Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012)

An illustration from an 1880 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "The mystic ball of fire."

"Don't take this the wrong way, but you sure seem different than when we spent all that time in Alaska."
—Craig Odanovich, Hanging By a Thread

An illustration from a 1900 issue of The Strand magazine.  The caption reads: "Monsieur Bibi's boom-boom stepped out."

Dedicated to Teresa Burritt.

"Call it a hunch.  You know, a five-letter word for feeling."
—Debra Dixon, Bad to the Bone (2012)


A still from the classic Young Frankenstein.

An illustration from an 1885 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "View East from Ampersand."

photo by Cobalt 123

"Freud notes that ideas (and sometimes solutions to problems) seem to just pop into awareness apropos of nothing. Where do they come from? Where are such problems worked out?"
—Frank Tallis, Hidden Minds: A History of the Unconscious (2012)

"I wanted to be a vice president at a place with an ampersand."
—Lee Nichols, Hand-Me-Down (2012)

"It is indubitably true that 'God is.'"*
—The Historical Constitution of St. Bonaventure's Philosophy

An illustration from an 1883 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "The night's Plutonian shore."

André Gide: an artist shouldn't recount his life exactly as he's lived it, but rather live it exactly as he is going to recount it.

An illustration from an 1876 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "For the night deepens, and without the gate evil spirits hide and wait."