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Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Quote of the Day: “To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement.”

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense
the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single
sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody
can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire
of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."
- Mark Twain,  Letter to Emeline Beach, 10 Feb 1868

[Hat tip James Stevens Valliant]

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1 comment:

  1. Sarah Wilshaw-SparkesJun 10, 2015, 3:18:00 PM

    Hence one of Twain's other mot justes (well, phrase juste) “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” So true.

    ReplyDelete

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