"I would always rather use a knife than a revolver; I think it is a more elegant weapon."Related post: Contempt for Archers.
"I dare say it is only a matter of habit," answered Ashenden. "Perhaps you are more at home with a knife."
"Anyone can pull a trigger, but it needs a man to use a knife."
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, September 20, 2020
A Choice of Weapons
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965), Ashenden, or The British Agent (1928; rpt. London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1956), p. 68: