Why did I choose to fill these pages in this particular issue with this mixture of rather tenuous reflections and autobiography??

See half of 'em in their graves before I choose my own coffin.

In one of these letters she tells him that " I choose what I believe, and say nothing.

: Either I will choose soup or I will choose salad.

: I will not choose soup.

: Therefore, I will choose salad.

Nothing is known of her until in order to seal an alliance between two Saxon kingdoms, her half-brother, King Athelstan of England, sent two of his sisters to Germany, instructing the Duke of Saxony ( later Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor ) to choose whichever one pleased him best.

In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty wrote: “ Insofar as I have hands, feet ; a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose ” ( 1962, p. 440 ).

I gave you facts that you can report if so choose.

But I happen to believe that the world is what we choose to make it, and that we are what we choose to make ourselves ; and that our renascence or our ruin will alike, ultimately and equally, testify with a trumpet to our liberty.

I choose John ... a name sweet to us because it is the name of our father, dear to me because it is the name of the humble parish church where I was baptized, the solemn name of numberless cathedrals scattered throughout the world, including our own basilica John Lateran.

After his death, it would be 415 years before another Pope would choose a name with an ordinal number less than IV ( John Paul I ).

I would choose the right-hand weevil.

:: Captain Aubrey: " There, I have you !... Do you not know that in the Service, one must always choose the lesser of two weevils?

When French emperor Napoleon I completed his conquest of Northern Italy and began to push his armies towards the edges of the northern territories of the Papal State, San Marino found itself forced to choose between maintaining the alliance with the Papal State or creating a new one with France.

Frey, a leading animal rights critic, who wrote in 1983 that, if forced to choose between abandoning experiments on animals and allowing experiments on " marginal-case " humans, he would choose the latter, " not because I begin a monster and end up choosing the monstrous, but because I cannot think of anything at all compelling that cedes all human life of any quality greater value than animal life of any quality.

I let up on the accelerator, only to gradually reach again the 60 m.p.h. which would, I hoped, overhaul Herry and the blonde, and as there were cars whose drivers apparently had something more important to catch than had I, Mrs. Major Roebuck settled down to practicing on Corporal Johnson the kittenish wiles she would need when making her duty call on Colonel and Mrs. Somebody in Sante Fe.

In his Message of December 2, 1862, he put his purpose and his policy in these words -- which I would call the Lincoln Law of Liberty-and-Union: `` In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free ''.

Accordingly, it is the aim of this essay to advance a new theory of imitation ( which I shall call mimesis in order to distinguish it from earlier theories of imitation ) and a new theory of invention ( which I shall call symbol for reasons to be stated hereafter ).

But I suspect that the old Roman was referring to change made under military occupation -- the sort of change which Tacitus was talking about when he said, `` They make a desert, and call it peace '' ( `` Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant ''.

I used his polarity to illustrate what I thought had happened to us in that form of liberalism we call Progressivism.

The Commission seems to represent the viewpoint of what I would call the unconscious liberal, but not unconscious enough, to invoke the now taboo symbolism of socialism.

today, these many years later, after all the temptations resisted or yielded to, the weasel satisfactions and the engulfing dissatisfactions since endured, I call it corrupting still.

I used to go with Watson to call on the eminent neurologist at his apartment, to sit among the doctor's excellent collection of statues, paintings, and books and drink Oriental coffee while Watson seemed to thaw out and become almost affable.

I would say, too, that the study of literature tends to give a person what I shall call depth.

It reminded me of my other professor, Edward Kennard Rand, of whom I had been so fond when I was at Harvard, the great mediaevalist and classical scholar who had asked me to call him `` Ken '', saying, `` Age counts for nothing among those who have learned to know life sub specie aeternitatis ''.

Apropos of what some would call cynicism, I remember an anecdote the source of which I forget.

Just as I know I would make a bad soldier even though I cannot sincerely call myself a pacifist, so too I would not be either a hangman by profession or, if I could avoid it, even a member of a hanging jury.

This desire, I went on, growing voluble as my conviction was aroused, had mounted at such a rate recently that I now found its realization necessary not only to my physical but also to my spiritual wellbeing.

I don't get it why this time I should pull such a stupid trick ''.

How he returned in such a ghastly condition, or why, I cannot say.

I am naive, they say, to make use of such words.

I asked the same questions inside the launch-control rooms of an Atlas missile base in Wyoming, where officers who wear sidearms are manning the `` commit buttons '' that could start a war -- accidentally or by design -- and in the command centers where other pistol-packing men could give orders to push such buttons.

I do not know if such a way of life can come to be a self-conscious challenge, but I suspect that it can.

In spots such as the elbows and knees the second skin is worn off and I realized the aborigines were much darker than they appeared ; ;

I knew that a conversation with the author would not settle such questions, because a man is not the same as his writing: in the last analysis, the questions had to be settled by the work itself.

I am not making a clinical judgment here, for such personal tragedies are real and are commonplace in the analyst's consulting room, but literature makes a different claim upon our sympathies than tragedy in life.

You probably would not remember, since you never seemed to remember even the same moments as I, much less their intensity, one sunny midday on Fifth Avenue when you had set out with me for some final shopping less than a week before the wedding you staged for me with such reluctance at the Farm.

`` We were requested by the Secretary General, as I understand it, to discuss with you such matters as appear to us to be relevant, and we are not of course either a formal group or a committee in the sense of being guided by any rules or regulations of the Secretariat.

If `` Jack the Courtier '' is really to be taken as Swift, the following remark is obviously Steele's comment on Swift's change of parties and its effect on their friendship: `` I assure you, dear Jack, when I first found out such an Allay in you, as makes you of so malleable a Constitution, that you may be worked into any Form an Artificer pleases, I foresaw I should not enjoy your Favour much longer ''.

I was delighted to make that personal contact in such trying and unusual circumstances.

I mean such concepts as the presence of the supernatural in human affairs, the sacraments of grace and divine retribution, the idea of preordainment ( the oracle over Oedipus, the prophecy of the witches to Macbeth, or God's covenant with His people in Athalie ).

In his letter mentioning Shakespeare on January 24, 1597/8, Sturley asked Quiney especially that `` theare might ( be ) bi Sir Ed. Grev. some meanes made to the Knightes of the Parliament for an ease and discharge of such taxes and subsedies wherewith our towne is like to be charged, and I assure u I am in great feare and doubte bi no meanes hable to paie.

Never hearing from him again, I remembered the little boy of whom I had had such doubts when he was ten years old.

For my part I find it difficult to conceive such a state of affairs.