An Even More Sinister Analgesic

Zadie Smith White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton,  2000), p. 167.

If religion is the opium of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.

Great Poets

Great poets seldom make bricks without straw; they pile up all the excellencies they can beg, borrow, or steal from their predecessors and contemporaries, and they set their own inimitable light atop of the mountain.

Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance. Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1952; 1910), p. 162.