Lapidary Quotes

I cherish the review-as-literature; as lapidary journalism in the eighteenth-century mode, the last hard sparkling diamond in theessayists's tarnished crown. To me, writing a good review is not just a way to make extra money, but a sacred duty. ~ Florence King

While reading writers of great formulatory power - Henry James, Santayana, Proust - I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C'mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer's cramp while reading. ~ Joseph Epstein

Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones. ~ James Joyce

Metz's Perfection chronicles with lapidary precision one woman's climb back to happiness after not just a spouse's death, but also the shocking recognition that her life before that death was not what she had thought it was. The journey is a painful one, but Ms. Metz is much the stronger for having survived to recount it. ~ Julie Powell

Nothing is more beautiful than an organized width, and nothing is worse than an unorganized lapidary. ~ David Berkowitz Chicago

In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath. ~ Samuel Johnson

Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things. ~ China Mieville