Gleanings from My Readings

"Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief."
---Jane Austen, in Emma

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“One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.”
---George Orwell, in his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

“We’re so saturated in media today that anyone who is following is bound to think, ‘This is terrible language; what are the effects of these clichés on my mind?’”
---George Packer, staff writer at the New Yorker (2008)

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“His father starts the next page. He lies back and moves his hands through the air to the sound of his father’s voice. Thinking about words. The shapes of words.”
--David Wroblewski, in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

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“We can’t read other people’s hearts. We just know what’s in our own, what wrongs we are capable of, and that knowledge is terrible enough.”
---Anne Lamott, from Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

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From Wallace Steven’s poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

“I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.”

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From Sir Walter Raleigh’s The 11th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia:

“The blossumes fallen, the sapp gon from the tree,
The broken monuments of my great desires,
From thes so lost what may th’ affections bee,
What heat in Cynders of extinguisht fiers?”

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From Langston Hughes’ poem “My People”:

The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.”

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Happy Reading!