Date: 1760-7

"What a conjuncture was here lost! ... my uncle Toby in one of the finest dispositions for it in the world;--his head like a smoak-jack;--the funnel unswept, and the ideas whirling round and round about in it, all obfuscated and darkened over with fuliginous matter!"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"As for my uncle Toby, his smoak-jack had not made a dozen revolutions, before he fell asleep also. "

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"There are others again, who will draw a man's character from no other helps in the world, but merely from his evacuations; --but this often gives a very incorrect out-line,--unless, indeed, you take a sketch of his repletions too; and by correcting one drawing from the other, compound one good ...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Whether Susannah, by taking her hand too suddenly from off the corporal's shoulder, (by the whisking about of her passions)--broke a little the chain of his reflections--"

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"[A]nd this leads me to the affair of Whiskers--but, by what chain of ideas--I leave as a legacy in mort main to Prudes and Tartufs, to enjoy and make the most of."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"But how great was his apprehension, when he further understood, that this force, acting upon the very vertex of the head, not only injured the brain itself or cerebrum,--but that it necessarily squeez'd and propell'd the cerebrum towards the cerebellum, which was the immediate seat of the unders...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"Angels and Ministers of grace defend us! cried my father,--can any soul withstand this shock?--No wonder the intellectual web is so rent and tatter'd as we see it; and that so many of our best heads are no better than a puzzled skein of silk,--all perplexity,--all confusion within side."

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"It wonderfully explain'd and accounted for the acumen of the Asiatic genius, and that sprightlier turn, and a more penetrating intuition of minds, in warmer climates; not from the loose and common-place solution of a clearer sky, and a more perpetual sun-shine, &c.--which, for aught he knew, mig...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"It wonderfully explain'd and accounted for the acumen of the Asiatic genius, and that sprightlier turn, and a more penetrating intuition of minds, in warmer climates; not from the loose and common-place solution of a clearer sky, and a more perpetual sun-shine, &c.--which, for aught he knew, mig...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)

Date: 1760-7

"I mention this, not only as matter of hypothesis or conjecture upon the progress and establishment of my father's many odd opinions,--but as a warning to the learned reader against the indiscreet reception of such guests, who, after a free and undisturbed enterance, for some years, into our brai...

— Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768)