Gleanings from My Readings

“I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.”
---Jane Austen, from Sense and Sensibility

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“So that, strictly speaking, the imagination is never governed; it is always the ruling and Divine power. . . . And thus Iliad, The Inferno, the Pilgrim’s Progress, the Faerie Queene, are all of them true dreams; only the sleep of the men to whom they came was the deep, living sleep which God sends, with a sacredness in it, as of death, the revealer of secrets.”
---John Ruskin

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“Blogging is writing out loud.”
---Andrew Sullivan, in “Why I Blog,” The Atlantic, November 2008, p108

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“It was one of those perfect northern California days when dozens of children and dogs are running on the beach and pelicans are flying overhead, and the mountain and the green ridges rise up behind you, and it’s so golden and balmy that you inevitably commit great acts of hubris.”
---Anne Lamott, from Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

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“I know nothing, except what everyone knows—
if there when Grace dances, I should dance.”
---W. H. Auden

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From the Scottish poet William Dunbar’s poem “Lament for the Makers” (1508):

“Since for the Death remeid is none,
Best is that we for Death dispone,
After our death that live may we,
Timor Mortis conturbat me.” (The fear of death bewilders me)

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From Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella:

“Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows;
And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus, great with child so to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spit:
‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write!’”

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Happy Reading!