Probable Conditions

Famous quotes containing the words probable and/or conditions:

“I have very lately read the Prince of Abyssinia [Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas]MI am almost equally charmed and shocked at it—the style, the sentiments are inimitable—but the subject is dreadful—and, handled as it is by Dr. Johnson, might make any young, perhaps old, person tremble—O heavens! how dreadful, how terrible it is to be told by a man of his genius and knowledge, in so affectingly probable a manner, that true, real happiness is ever unattainable in this world!”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)

“The strong sunlight, the wind from the sea,
all the conditions of its existence,
may have flaked off the paint, if ever it was painted,
and made it homelier than it was.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)