Inscription Quotes - page 3
The essence of Vassar is mythic. Today, despite much competition, it still figures in the public mind as the archetypal woman's college. [...] It signifies a certain je ne sais quoi; a whiff of luxury and the ineffable; plain thinking and high living. [...] For different people, in fact, at different periods, Vassar can stand for whatever is felt to be wrong with the modern female: humanism, atheism, Communism, short skirts, cigarettes, psychiatry, votes for women, free love, intellectualism. Pre-eminently among American college women, the Vassar girl is thought of as carrying a banner. The inscription on it varies with the era or with the ideas of the beholder and in the final sense does not matter - the flushed cheek and tensed arm are what count.
Mary McCarthy
Cordelia read the inscription carved deep on the headstone. "At rest": the commonest epitaph of a generation to whom rest must have seemed the ultimate luxury, the supreme benediction.
"It's a nice stone, isn't it?"
"Yes, it is. I was admiring the lettering."
"Cut deep, that is. It cost a mint of money but it was worth it. That'll last, you see. Half the lettering here won't, it's that shallow. It takes the pleasure out of a cemetery. I like to read the grave stones, like to know who people were and when they died and how long the women lived after they buried their men. It sets you wondering how they managed and whether they were lonely. There's no use in a stone if you can't read the lettering."
P. D. James
He was a writer of paragraphs and short editorials. He always hoped to write something of permanent value, but the business of making a living took most of his time and he never got around to it. In his youth he felt an urge to reform the world, but during the latter years of his life he decided that he would be doing rather well if he kept himself out of jail. ... When the last clod had fallen, workmen covered the grave with a granite slab bearing the inscription: "Submitted to the Publisher by Robert Quillen."
Robert Quillen
