Quotation of the Day

“. . . a thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”

(Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, p. 95)

Inelegantly expressed, but the thought is interesting.

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2 Responses to Quotation of the Day

  1. Bede says:

    The construction harkens back to the Anglo-Saxon.

  2. Alfred M. Kriman says:

    I’d say it’s clunky but elegant. Clunky because “thought-murder”
    is, but elegant because it’s compact and precise. Absent the hyphen, “thought murder” might be the murder of a thought. With it, on the established model of thought-experiment, “thought-murder” must be a murder committed in thought only. Perhaps Gedankenmord had been better.

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