'two fingers on one hand'

'So you don't want me for a husband?'

The girl eyed him hard, and said: 'No.'

'For your lover?' Gringoire went on.

She pouted and answered: 'No.'

'For your friend?' Gringoire perservered.

Again she eyed him hard, and after a moment's thought, she said: 'Perhaps.'

This 'perhaps', so dear to philosophers, emboldened Gringoire.

'Do you know what friendship is?' he asked.

'Yes,' answered the gypsy. 'It's being brother and sister, two souls which touch without merging, two fingers on one hand.'

'And love?' Gringoire continued.

'Oh, love!' she said, and her voice trembled and her eye shone. 'That's being two and only one. A man and a woman who merge into an angel. That is heaven.'

—Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris (1831) (trans. John Sturrock 1978)

'comme le cygne trouble l'eau'

La chanson de la bohémienne avait troublé la rêverie de Gringoire, mais comme le cygne trouble l'eau. Il l'écoutait avec une sorte de ravissement et d'oubli de toute chose. C'était depuis plusieurs heures le premier moment où il ne se sentît pas souffrir.

Ce moment fut court.

—Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris (1831)

The gypsy's song had disturbed Gringoire's daydream but only as a swan disturbs the water. He heard it in a sort of rapture, oblivious of all else. It was the first time in several hours that he had not felt he was suffering.

But not for long.

—Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame of Paris (1831) (trans. John Sturrock 1978)

"We all became Israelis"

The one thing that so many people have missed about CIA and 9/11, including the 9/11 Commission, so far as I could tell, is that it was personal with us. Fighting terrorism is what we do; it's in our blood. In the months and years leading up to 9/11, we had worked this ground every day. To thwart the terrorists we disrupted attacks, we saved lives. We sacrificed our lives too, often figuratively and sometimes literally.

If the politicians and press and even the 9/11 Commission often failed to understand this, our global partners in the intelligence business had no doubt. We were still sorting out the details on 9/11 when Avi Dichter, the chief of Shin Bet, called from Israel to express his regrets and say that he and his people were with us, no matter what. This wasn't a bureaucratic call. Avi and I had lived through Arafat together and much more, but there was a connection through that phone call that went far beyond anything that had proceeded it. Be strong, Avi told me. Lead your people. He didn't have to say that he had seen hundreds of his own countrymen killed by terrorists, on his watch and I didn't have to add that I now understood what it was like to be the chief of the service when the same thing happened on my soil. All that was implicit, and stronger because it never had to be spoken. Several years later, though, in taping a farewell message for Avi's retirement ceremony, I put into words what I felt so strongly about 9/11: "We all became Israelis on that day," I told Avi.

George Tenet, "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA"

Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.

[I]t is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilised. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness. There must be freedom and there must be peace. Not a wheel must grate, not a light glimmer. The curtains must be close drawn. The writer, I thought, once his experience is over, must lie back and let his mind celebrate its nuptials in darkness.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Hosni Mubarak, President of Egypt

I didn't know Hosni Mubarak as well, but he has been one of our most reliable partners in fighting terrorism and in trying to bring peace to the Middle East. Ours wasn't a peer-to-peer relationship. He was a very important historical figure. He had been president of Egypt since 1981, following Sadat's murder. He barely escaped assassination himself in 1995, while in Ethiopia; four years later, he escaped death again when he was nicked by an assailant's knife. He has a tremendous amount of wisdom, but although a serious man, he also had a lighter side. The October 2000 summit at Sharm el-Sheikh was an example. Umar Suleiman and I had spent the entire day locked in a room with the Palestinians and the Israelis trying to strike a security bargain. When we were through, I went off to brief Yasser Arafat on the details, while Mubarak drowsily took a seat in the corner of the room. Arafat had a way in these circumstances of looking at me as if I were speaking in an incomprehensible foreign language. This was typical of him; he was buying time to think things through. But on this occasion, the situation was not business as usual. From the corner of my eye, I saw Hosni Mubarak, the president of Egypt, host of the conference, and the closest thing Palestine had to a guarantor, looking at me and Arafat and twirling his finger beside his head, the universal symbol for "This guy you're talking to is nuts!" I went on with the briefing--I am a trained professional, after all--but it wasn't easy, especially when Mubarak dissolved into quiet laughter over his little gag.

--George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence, At the Center of the Storm, My Years at the CIA (2007)

A cat both brazen and disciplined

...Ivan focused his attention on the cat and saw this strange cat go up to the footboard of an 'A' tram waiting at a stop, brazenly elbow aside a woman, who screamed, grab hold of the handrail, and even make an attempt to shove a ten-kopeck piece into the conductress's hand through the window, open on account of the stuffiness.

Ivan was so struck by the cat`s behaviour that he froze motionless by the grocery store on the corner, and here he was struck for a second time, but much more strongly, by the conductress's behaviour. As soon as she saw the cat getting into the tram-car, she shouted with a malice that even made her shake: 'No cats allowed! Nobody with cats allowed! Scat! Get off, or I`ll call the police!'

Neither the conductress nor the passengers were struck by the essence of the matter: not just that a cat was boarding a tram-car, which would have been good enough, but that he was going to pay!

The cat turned out to be not only a solvent but also a disciplined animal. At the very first shout from the conductress, he halted his advance, got off the footboard, and sat down at the stop, rubbing his whiskers with the ten-kopeck piece. But as soon as the conductress yanked the cord and the tram-car started moving off, the cat acted like anyone who has been expelled from a tram-car but still needs a ride. Letting all three cars go by, the cat jumped on to the rear coupling-pin of the last one, wrapped its paws around some hose sticking out of the side, and rode off, thus saving himself ten kopecks.

-Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and the Margarita (1966)

—you know the little tug—

Here then was I … sitting on the banks of a river a week or two ago in fine October weather, lost in thought. … There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until—you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating.

—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

"What I Know"

There's a secret that real writers know and wannabe writers don't, and the secret is this: It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.

What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

—Steven Pressfield, The War of Art (2002)

...that his life was ordinary...

And the thought that he was an ordinary man, and that his life was ordinary, rejoiced and consoled him.

—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, "The Kiss" (1887) (The Modern Library translation, 1932)

I live, yet not I

...wherein the image of the Beloved is outlined in such a manner, and so completely pictured, when there is union of love, that it is true to say that the Beloved lies in the lover and the lover in the Beloved; and such manner of likeness does love make in the transformation of the two that are in love that it may be said that each is in the other and both are one....Thus each lives in the other, and the one is the other, and both are one through the transformation of love. It is this that St. Paul meant when he said: "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." For in saying ‘I live, yet not I,’ he meant that, although he lived, his life was not his own, because he was transformed in Christ and his life was divine rather than human.

St. John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 12, 7

...echoing through the canon...

[T]he various inaccuracies and other inadequacies of the King James Version, though they justify a new translation, are beside the point when it comes to that version’s aesthetic power. The K.J.V. is so ingrained—its poetry has so completely seeped into the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world—that a new rendering, however valuable, is a vaguely disconcerting experience. In the four centuries since its completion, the K.J.V. has become our lives’ background poetry, its phrases and rhythms echoing through the canon, having been endlessly plundered by writers in search of a turn of phrase, or of a certain resonance unattainable elsewhere.

—Nathaniel Stein, "The Sun (Also) Rises: How Alter's New Translation Fares in Literature," posted on The New Yorker's The Book Bench blog (October 1, 2010)