“What I have applied to language, is still more justly applicable to sentiments and manners. The passions, the sources from which these must spring in all their modifications, are generally the same in all ranks and conditions, all countries and ages; and it follows, as a matter of course, that the opinions, habits of thinking, and actions, however influenced by the peculiar state of society, must still, upon the whole, bear a strong resemblance to each other.”

Dedicatory Epistle to Sir Walter Scott Ivanhoe

“We live surrounded by mysteries and imagine that by inventing names we explain them.”

W.B. Seabrook, “Goat-Cry, Girl-Cry,” in Chancellor Press Great Ghost Stories

“the belief of French poststructuralism, exemplified by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, that the ‘subject’ – the thinking, single agent, the ‘I’ of every sentence, was an illusion: all you had left was language, not mentality… Once there were writers, but now there is only what Foucault derisively called ‘the author function.’”

Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint

 "He has planted his last potato. Han har satt sin sista potatis."

“Idioms from Sweden” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2005)

"a hotbed of cold feet."

George Will in National Post October 9, 2001 (a complicated metaphor applying to U.S. Senate Democrats over Iraq in 1991 what was said of "All Souls College, Oxford at the time of the 1956 Suez crisis")