Logan Pearsall Smith
American essayist and critic
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
We each of us possess, in a greater or less degree, what the Germans call "speech-feeling", a sense of what is worthy of adoption and what should be avoided and condemned. This in almost all of us is an instinctive process; we feel the advantages or disadvantages of new forms and new distinctions, although we should be hard put to it to give a reason for our feeling.
—Logan Pearsall Smith, American essayist and critic, The English Language, 1930
Posted on August 27, 1998 at 6:36 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers.
—Logan Pearsall Smith, American essayist and critic, All Trivia, 1933
Posted on June 29, 1998 at 2:21 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
—Logan Pearsall Smith, American essayist and critic, Afterthoughts, 1931
Posted on August 11, 1999 at 6:29 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Those who talk on the razor-edge of double-meanings pluck the rarest blooms from the precipice on either side.
—Logan Pearsall Smith, American essayist and critic, Afterthoughts, 1931
Posted on February 15, 1999 at 4:24 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.
—Logan Pearsall Smith, American essayist and critic, Afterthoughts
Posted on May 22, 2002 at 11:41 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
There is one thing that matters— to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.
—Logan Pearsall Smith, American essayist and critic, quoted in Cyril Connoly, "A Tribute to Logan Pearsall Smith" in The New Statesman, 1946
Posted on January 7, 2002 at 9:14 AM
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