There is this difference between a story and a poem, that a story is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, cause and effect; the other is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds. The one is partial, and applies only to a definite period of time, and a certain combination of events which can never again recur; the other is universal, and contains within itself the germ of a relation to whatever motives or actions have place in the possible varieties of human nature.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.
—Italo Calvino (1923–1985)
It’s apparent that we can’t proceed any further without a name for this institutionalized garrulousness, this psychological patter, this need to catalogue the ego’s condition. Let’s call it psychobabble, this spirit which now tyrannizes conversation in the seventies.
—Richard Dean Rosen (b. 1949)