Did you know that Santa, back when he was svelte, used to deliver presents on New Year's Eve and not Christmas Eve?  This illustration is from The Family Magazine, 1840.

"A rose is a rose is a rose because innately there is a mechanism whereby the mind understands that a unit, in spite of its individual characteristics, belongs to a composite."
—Ilan Stavans, Return to Centro Historico (2011)

"Monsieur Oiselle."

(That's a Googlewhack, as of this posting.)

(Thanks, Mike!)

An illustration from a 1900 issue of The Windsor magazine.

Marguerite Duras, when asked if death frightened her, said, "I don't know know anything anymore since I've reached the sea." Enrique Vila-Matas said, "What terrifies me about the idea of eternal death is to never be able to see the sea again, the waves breaking in winter on deserted beaches."

An illustration from a 1904 issue of The Windsor magazine.  The caption reads: "Was it you that spoke?"

"This might surprise you a little bit, but I would look for someone who had a quality that I call winsomeness."
—Bill Hybels, New Identity

An illustration from an 1899 issue of Harper's magazine.  The caption reads: "Of course tears followed."

One hundred and eighteen years before Twitter, the immature gathered out of doors to exchange "five minutes' stories."  (The illustration is from Five Minutes' Stories by Mrs. Molesworth, 1888.)

An illustration from a 1904 issue of The Windsor magazine.  The caption reads: "On and on they sailed."

"This may surprise you and you may not even know this, but when you leave your power and influence leaves with you."
—Davidson L. Haworth, The Wizard of Prali (2011)

Eighty-two years before Coldplay proclaimed, "It was all yellow," everything was turning yellow in The Panama Plot by Arthur Benjamin Reeve (1918).

Statistics [and we realize that with good cause we've lost most of you after using that horrible, horrible word] tell us that "The weather today clearly depends on yesterday's weather.  It might also depend on the weather two days ago but as a first approximation we might assume that the dependence is only one day back" (Larry Wasserman, All of Statistics: A Concise Course in Statistical Inference, 2003).

An illustration from a 1905 issue of The Windsor magazine.  The caption reads: "It was the crux ansata, the Symbol of Life itself."

Did you know that Santa's nightmare word is "unfilled"?  We find proof in Life, 1918.

An illustration from an 1895 issue of The Canadian magazine.  The caption reads: "And thus he passed into the night again for evermore."

"The truest answer is simply: 'If you go, then I'll miss you . . . terribly.'”

—Julia Hoban, Willow (2010)