"Orthodoxy was never a religion of speculation anyway, but a waterfall of sound and colour, bleeding beauty off into the wings, overwhelming its unhappy brood with its mystical cant, and sending its harmonious dirges down the soul river of time." --Larry Frolick, Grand Centaur Station (2004)

The ancient bricks more beautiful than anything we can think to fill this space with.

"The Suq al-Warraqin, or bookdealers' market, in tenth century Baghdad contained one hundred booksellers." --Night & Horses & the Desert ed Robert Irwin (1999)

"Maybe, Murray supposed, he would get there in ten or eleven years' time. The fact that it would take the 31 years left to him, and still not be completed, might not have dismayed him had he known the fate of the other great multi-volume European dictionaries that were under way at around the same time. Although Emile Littre's rather short Dictionnaire de la langue francaise took only a decade from publication of its first volume to the last--though 32 years from the conception of the plan--the Grimm brothers' Deutsches Worterbuch, which was six times bulkier than its French equivalent, was begun in 1838 and fully finished only in 1961. If that was not long enough, the Dutch dictionary known as Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal was started in 1851 and completed in 1998, 147 years later. And a nineteenth-century attempt to fix the entire Swedish tongue between hard cover continues today into the twenty-first century, with scholars still stuck on the complexities of Swedish words beginning with the letter S." --Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything (2003)

Salvage in itself is a worthy art. In fact, it may be the art of arts.

"Poker is to New Orleans as waltzing is to Vienna, firecrackers to Beijing." --S Frederick Starr, New Orleans Unmasqued (1985)

Can you imagine a people giving up electric for gaslight, for aesthetic reasons?