Gleanings from My Readings

“I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman's feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.”
---Jane Austen, in Mansfield Park

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“I hope, too, that my book will illuminate my belief that love of art—be it poetry, storytelling, painting, sculpture, or music—enables people to transcend any barrier man has yet devised.”
---Mary Ann Schaeffer, in the Acknowledgments of her The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

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“I was allowed free run of the small school library, though it was supposed to be for high schoolers. It contained a shabby collection of once-popular fiction. I read the longest book in it, Gone With the Wind, and much later, in Lonesome Dove, produced what I consider to be the Gone With the Wind of the West.”
---Larry McMurtry, in his Books: A Memoir

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“A quiet disposition and a heart giving thanks at any given moment is the real test of the intent to which we love God in that moment.”
---Francis Schaeffer, in True Spirituality

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From Jonathan Swift’s poem “Stella’s Birthday, 1727”:

“This day then, let us not be told,
That you are sick, and I grown old,
Nor think on our approaching ills,
And talk of spectacles and pills.
Tomorrow will be time enough
To hear such mortifying stuff.” (3-8)

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William Blake’s “The Garden of Love,” from Songs of Experience (1793)

“I went to the Garden of Love
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flower bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.”

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From Kenneth Koch’s poem “To You”:

“I am crazier than shirttails
In the wind, when you’re near,” (9-10)

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Happy Reading!