Love is what you've been through with somebody.
Friday, February 16, 2024
Sunday, October 01, 2023
Truer words ....
There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.
Dead men don’t find things out.
Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
Saturday, September 30, 2023
Rules
That’s why there’s rules, understand? So that you think before you break ’em.
Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time
Wednesday, August 02, 2023
You cannot make Italians really progressive; they are too intelligent. Men who see the short cut to good living will never go by the new elaborate roads.
G.K. Chesterton, in the The Paradise of Thieves (A Father Brown mystery)
Saturday, July 22, 2023
Wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.
G.K. Chesterton, in the The Blue Cross (A Father Brown mystery) as attributed to "Poe."
Monday, December 26, 2022
He took comfort in knowing that the world would carry on without him-and, in fact, already had.
Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
Friday, December 23, 2022
It is a sad but unavoidable fact of life … that as we age our social circles grow smaller. Whether from increased habit or diminished vigor, we suddenly find ourselves in the company of just a few familiar faces.
Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
Tuesday, November 22, 2022
A man -- a viewing-point man -- while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who through possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a viewing-point man thinks of Jesus or St. Augustine or Socrates he regards them with love because they are the symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he would rather be successful than good. In an animal other than man we would replace the term "good" with "weak survival quotient" and the term "bad" with "strong survival quotient." Thus, man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness: Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.
Monday, November 21, 2022
Saturday, July 30, 2022
Facts are like cows, if you look them in the face hard enough they generally run away.
Bunter’s mother in Clouds of Witness, Dorothy Sayers
Friday, July 15, 2022
Blake: From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
What is now proved was once only imagined.
Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.
Expect poison from the standing water.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
To create a little flower is the labor of ages.
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Wednesday, June 08, 2022
Eloquence and erudition were the twin prerequisites of greatness ... any effort expended in the cultivation of such gifts would surely be rewarded, if not in this world then in the world to come.
Catherine Nicholson, on Milton in the NYR.
Friday, June 03, 2022
All women ... were calculating—even if their calculations took place somewhere south of their conscious awareness. All women weighed and measured; did not always listen to the results rationally, but made efforts in that direction that most men I knew could not duplicate or understand.
Greg Bear, Legacy
Thursday, April 21, 2022
Wednesday, February 09, 2022
From a wonderful and beautiful book
Life is hard. Everyone believes the world is ending all the time. But so far, all of them have been wrong.... The truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.
Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
What’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do?
Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons
Monday, October 04, 2021
Patience under duress is rarely appreciated by the politically immature.
Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings