Category: Lit & Crit

“Dog wants only a dry hole. Wants only tasty bone. Wants the cockles off him. All else is luxury.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog

“There’s much to be said for looting the past.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog

“Dog’s curse comes announced by wind and wind says, ‘The maggots shall eat you all. One way or another maggot shall rule the world.’ Dog is loose in the memory or he’d rise up and demand a higher shelf for his life and invent sweet myths to explain it all. Once upon a time, two ticks in the Garden, one saying to the other, What this place needs is a dog. . . .” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog

“You owe no one nothing, least of all yourself. What’s life anyway, but a hill of beans? Don’t feel bad.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog

“The framework of plans for the final massive assault against Japan had been started in 1943 and 1944; the military machine for executing them was in existence and needed only to be moved into position. Schooled in the necessity of preparing for every contingency, fearful that public pressures might lead to the premature dismantling of the military machine, and, for the most part, unaware of the new technological revolution brewing in the laboratories and on the testing grounds, American military staffs continued to work at completing the structure around the framework of plans until the very moment that the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima presented startling evidence of the arrival of a new age in warfare.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Logistics of a One-Front War,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945

“The argument can certainly be made that the Japanese would hardly have surrendered except in the certain knowledge that the United States had the means, the plans, and the intent to invade, whatever the effects of bombing (atomic and conventional), blockade, and Soviet entry into the war. Legitimate criticism can still be directed at the massive scale on which the final effort against Japan was planned when forces of the Army and Navy and of America’s allies are taken into consideration, at the seeming absorption of the military staffs in preparing for the execution of plans that had generated a momentum of their own, and at their failure to take into consideration in their plans the possibility of Japan’s collapse, or to even begin a downward adjustment of force requirements until that collapse was a certainty.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Logistics of a One-Front War,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945

“On 6 August 1945 an American B-29 dropped one atomic bomb on Hiroshima. On 8 August the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and its Far Eastern armies began their march into Manchuria. On 9 August another atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki. On 15 August a Japanese Government that had long before concluded that the war was lost made known its intention to surrender. On 2 September the surrender was consummated in ceremonies aboard the U.S.S. Missouri. The war against Japan thus came to its end in a manner radically different from that which the military planning staffs had envisaged. The elaborate plans and preparations for invasion of Japan had no ultimate utility.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Logistics of a One-Front War,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945

“On many Pacific islands supplies were to deteriorate in open storage until 1950 when the United States was to find a new and unexpected use for them in the Korean War. A naval historian, commenting on the roll-up of naval supplies in the South Pacific, has summed up the effort of the Army just as fittingly: ‘The logic of rolling forward rear bases was impeccable. In the case of personnel its urgency could not be denied. But to set up a cross current against the normal flow of supply and support proved to be extremely difficult, if not impracticable. Much of the usable material was in fact moved forward. The rest remained in the South Pacific to be locally disposed of or to stand as a monument to the unsparing waste of war and the greater importance of time over cost.’ The ‘greater importance of time over cost’ might indeed be designated as the most important factor in logistics in World War II.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Logistics of a One-Front War,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945

“After howl comes nothing, comes bleached bones, then dust’s mortification, then petrification, final bitter democracy.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog

“I won, I won, and all for what? Void, void, I thought, that’s all there is. Howl and only more howl comes back, it doomed to die like thunder on a summer plain, with no span of time so meaningfully shallow, so empty, so wretched pure in its silence as that one clapping down after thunder ceases—you won, oh you won, you’ve scattered the devils, but where’s the logic, where’s victory’s afterglow? Void, void, the true kingdom, void only and no other.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog

“We are dealing with distances half way around the world. We are dealing in personnel by the million. We are dealing with supply in millions of tons. A mass of detail and delicate timing is involved.” – General Brehon B. Somervell, USA, Commanding General, Army Service Forces, May 15, 1945 (as quoted by Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “Logistics of a One-Front War,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945)

“That final victory over Japan was assured, there was no longer any doubt in U.S. councils. Timing was the vital question. American staffs, reflecting the temper of American public opinion, were impatient. Their impatience, nevertheless, did not permit them to underestimate Japanese ability to resist. To the Army staff, at least, mass invasion seemed the quickest way, indeed the only way, in which Japanese capitulation could be assured. It was also undoubtedly the costliest way both in human lives and resources.” – Robert W. Coakley and Richard M. Leighton, “The Pacific in Transition,” Global Logistics and Strategy: 1943-1945

“Hold on to affection’s smallish stuff . . . for otherwise it is all hell in a bucket.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog

“Spiders will amaze me, for they are more shiftless than you may think. You will never see one spider running with another, or having fellowship of any sort, either with its own kind or another, and this is true for all varieties of them, of which there are more than there are grains of sand in our Guild Pit. Nor do the webbers have any vestige of humor. They are colder in their dispositions than a white-eyed turnip. They are of two sets, shortsighted and longsighted, I’ve noted, and it’s the former I’d sooner avoid. But I hate all spiders. I hate them for their webs primarily and for where they put them, but more that they will always go for my nose, then give a squeak before I can throttle them. But they make good comfrey for dog’s bad breath.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog

“Soul is an airy-fairy thing, with a cock-a-doodle-do for what you may think of it.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog

“In the natural hierarchy of medicine, first came physician, then surgeon, then tooth-drawer, tinker, horse-leech, sow-gelder, and conjuror.” – Leon Rooke, Shakespeare’s Dog

“How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 5.5

“It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another: therefore, let men take heed of their company.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 5.1

“A rotten case abides no handling.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 4.1

“We see which way the stream of time doth run, and are enforc’d from our most quiet sphere by the rough torrent of occasion.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 4.1

“He that dies this year is quit for the next.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 3.2

“There is a history in all men’s lives, figuring the nature of the times deceas’d; the which observ’d, a man may prophesy, with a near aim, of the main chance of things as yet not come to life, which in their seeds and weak beginnings lie intreasured. Such things become the hatch and brood of time.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 3.1

“O thoughts of men accurst! Past, and to come, seems best; things present, worst.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 1.3

“In an early spring we see the appearing buds; which, to prove fruit, hope gives not so much warrant as despair that frost will bite them.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 1.3

“A good wit will make use of anything.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 1.2

“A man can no more separate age and covetousness than he can part young limbs and lechery: but the gout galls the one, and the pox pinches the other.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part 1.2

“Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things, and drowns them in the depths of obscurity, no matter if they be quite unworthy of mention, or most noteworthy and important, and thus, as the tragedian says, ‘he brings from the darkness all things to the birth, and all things born envelops in the night.’ But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and to some extent checks its irresistible flow, and, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over, it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion.” – Anna Comnena, Alexiad (trans. Elizabeth A. S. Dawes)

“Open your ears; for which of you will stop the vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks? I, from the orient to the drooping west, making the wind my post-horse, still unfold the acts commenced on this ball of earth. Upon my tongues continual slanders ride, the which in every language I pronounce, stuffing the ears of men with false reports. I speak of peace, while covert enmity, under the smile of safety, wounds the world: And who but Rumour, who but only I, make fearful musters and prepar’d defence; whilst the big year, swoln with some other grief, is thought with child by the stern tyrant war, and no such matter? Rumour is a pipe blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures; and of so easy and so plain a stop that the blunt monster with uncounted heads, the still-discordant wavering multitude, can play upon it.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Second Part Induction

“To die is to be a counterfeit; for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. The better part of valour is discretion.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, First Part 5.4

“Thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool.” – William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, First Part 5.4