Gleanings from My Readings

"Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken."
---Jane Austen, in Emma

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“I would suggest that it is perfectly possible for a Christian to be so infiltrated by twentieth-century thinking that he lives most of his life as though the supernatural were not there. Indeed, I would suggest that all of us do this to some extent. . . . Doctrine is important, but it is not an end in itself. There is to be an experiential reality, moment by moment. And the glory of the experiential reality of the Christian, as opposed to the bare existential experience, or the religious experiences of the East, is that we can do it with the intellectual doors and windows open.”
---Francis Schaeffer, in True Spirituality

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“It was a likely story. But then, all of his stories were likely.”
---Margaret Atwood, from The Penelopiad

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“I remember lying in our hay-loft reading The Secret Garden with a cowbell beside me. I’d read for an hour and then ring the bell for a glass of lemonade to be brought to me. Mrs. Hutchins, the cook, finally grew weary of this arrangement and told my mother, and that was the end of my cowbell, but not my reading in the hay.” (108)
---Mary Ann Schaffer & Annie Barrows in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

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From Paul Zimmer’s poem “A Romance for the Wild Turkey”:

“Walking around in underbrush
Like a cantilevered question mark.” (12-13)

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From Lynne McMahon’s poem “Barbie’s Ferrari”:

“Nancy Drew in her yellow roadster, a convertible,
I always imagined, the means to an end
Almost criminal in its freedom, its motherlessness.” (11-13)

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From Galway Kinnell’s poem “St. Francis and the Sow”:

“for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,” (4-6)

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Happy Reading!