He was becoming aware that there was no such thing as over-the-top with Lawrence Davenport, as long as you were talking to Lawrence Davenport about Lawrence Davenport.

Mrs Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of making her clenliness more umcomfortable and unacceptable than dirt itself. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and some people do the same by their religion.

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. It's all right, he said. But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.

You maintain hope for humanity as an infinite skeptic of gossip and slander. In all mankind's desires for entertainment and exaggeration and sensationalism, when it comes to gossip, the individual always sounds worse than he really is. This is why adhering to gossip subtly affects the mental state of the listener - he goes on holding shady opinions regardless of where the realities of their lights and darknesses may stand.

The hype cheapens the hyped, as right things are then made wrong by exaggeration.

To exaggerate invariably weakens the point of what we have to say.

We always weaken whatever we exaggerate.

Exaggeration, the inseparable companion of greatness.

Vice-President Ford, possibly preparing for higher duties, assessed Kissinger's part in the Syrian-Israeli troop disengagement as the great diplomatic triumph of this century or perhaps any other.

To exaggerate is to weaken.

A tendency to exaggeration was a Roman trait.

Exaggeration is a prodigality of the judgment which shows the narrowness of one's knowledge or one's taste.

The temptation to vivify the tale and make it walk abroad on its own legs is hard to deny.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.

Exaggeration is a branch of lying.