Laconic Quotes
More Laconic Quotes
I mentioned to one of the gaolers my sense of this hardship, as an obstinate guilty person might deny the truth, whilst an innocent one, less courageous, might very readily, to relieve himself from such a state of misery, make a false confession. His answer was laconic: "Lago confess" ... "They soon confess."
— Irish lawyer William Sampson, writing of his experience under torture, quoting an inquisitor on its futility as a means of obtaining information Memoirs of William Sampson, 2nd Edition (1817), Letter XVII
[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but laconic, Boeotian even “at least not systematic”; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.
Randall Jarrell— “To the Laodiceans”, p. 21
Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but laconic, Boeotian even “at least not systematic”; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest.
Randall Jarrell— “To the Laodiceans”, p. 37
The weight and concentration of the poems fall upon things (and those great things, animals and people), in their tough, laconic, un-get-pastable plainness: they have kept the stolid and dangerous inertia of the objects of the sagas the sword that snaps, the man looking at his lopped-off leg and saying, “That was a good stroke.”
Randall Jarrell— “Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden’s Ideology”, p. 155
As I search the archives of my memory I seem to discern six types or methods which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and the pastepot which are its implements and emblem.
benjamin n. cardozo— On types of judicial writing, in "Law and Literature" in Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses (1931), p. 10.
