"If you've never made a personal balance sheet before, you may be quite surprised at your net worth."
—Brian R. Smith, How to Prosper in Your Own Business (1983)

"I'm afraid ... the more absences there are, the more things are possible.  And so if there's an absence the size of God, then there probably isn't anything so appalling that we can count on not meeting it." —Tim Powers, The Stress of Her Regard (the astonishing secret history of the tragic lives of the Romantics)

The (seemingly improbable) fourth side of a triangle, identified in this comic panel from Punch (1871), wasn't officially measured until 1993 by the University of Adelaide's B. F. Sherman (Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 66, No. 5).

One hundred years ago today, on July 3, 1913, Uncle Sam came out as a cross-dresser in LIFE magazine.

An illustration from an 1860 issue of Punch magazine.

Feast and famine, windfall and shortfall, prosperity and hardship, abundance and scarcity: a twofold wheat spirit from Punch, 1868.

"There is only a fine line between dream and reality, one often effaced in ordinary experience."
—Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (2012)

"Never forget that you learn to climb mountains by climbing."
—Frank C. McClelland, Office Training and Standards (1919)

"Or by taking the stairs."
—Prof. Oddfellow

"I had been dreaming a crowded dream full of unfamiliar characters—people I hadn't had time, or whom it hadn't seemed necessary, to name or even make distinct from one another.  It was a mob, practically, but its intent was unclear.  For what purpose had they congregated?" —Rebecca Wolff, The Beginners (2011)

This depiction of a crowded dream is from Punch, 1893.

"I'd say you've earned it, quite surprisingly."
—Zoraida Cordova, Vicious Deep (2012)

"Men!  They all the same, if they're not doing it, they're talking about it."  A still from Dear Ladies, series one.

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him ... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.  Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create -- so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation.  By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating." —Pearl S. Buck

"Write a novel about a young child who refuses to believe his mother (his only living parent) is his mother, because he refuses to believe he was born.  Maybe he's the Buddha or maybe he's just an idiot.  Maybe it's the same difference." —William Keckler