I strive to be brief, and I become obscure.
Brief
I worked for a brief spell as a journalist, but soon I discovered that I didn’t want to be a journalist – I wanted to be a historian.
The interval allowed was only five minutes, at the end of which I resumed the lecture; but so refreshing was the effects of the brief rest and, above all, the admission of pure air, that during the second hour the attention was as completely sustained as during the first.
I don’t like to have a calm, orderly, quiet place to work. I often compose while driving, compose in my head. It is true that I wrote my little book, ‘The Sounds of Poetry, A Brief Guide,’ almost entirely in airplanes and airport departure lounges.
Franklin was the best known of the Founding Fathers. His death could not go without some sort of official notice. The House of Representatives, after listening to a brief tribute by James Madison, voted to wear badges of mourning for two months and then got on with business.
If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams – the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death.
Great minds are related to the brief span of time during which they live as great buildings are to a little square in which they stand: you cannot see them in all their magnitude because you are standing too close to them.
No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change.
Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation.