Gleanings from My Readings

"To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment."
---Jane Austen, in Persuasion

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“We are talking about God. What wonder is it that you do not understand? If you do understand, then it is not God.”
---Augustine

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“Young Lincoln did have the King James Bible—who on the frontier didn’t? You could tell as much from his House Divided speech that stirred the whole country during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and by the biblical cadences, and content, of his Second Inaugural. The stories in The Book might not all have stuck with him, but the language certainly did.

And he had Shakespeare. Stored away in his memory and at the ready. Like a portable arsenal, entertainment, comfort, guide, treasure and elevation. Shakespeare and the King James Bible. No one could say he entered the fray unarmed.”
---“Where Did He Come From? The Enduring Mystery of Abraham Lincoln,” 2/12/09 editorial,
Arkansas Democrat Gazette

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“A BlackBerry can have detrimental effects even, or especially, when users turn it on when they are doing ‘nothing.’ That ‘nothing’ is what our pre-BlackBerry forebears called daydreaming, which is a propitious mental state for creativity, insight, and problem solving. Truly novel solutions and ideas emerge when the brain brings together unrelated facts and thoughts. . . . Daydreaming or thinking about something else keeps the signals off those rutted roads and allows far-flung facts and ideas to combine in novel ways . . . Hence the common experience of an ‘aha’ moment of creativity or insight about some problem when it is not commanding your conscious attention. If mental downtime becomes BlackBerry time, eurekas will be rarer.”
---Sharon Begley, in “Will the BlackBerry Sink the Presidency?” Newsweek 2/16/09

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“We newspaper readers all have our pet vexations. Somewhere in one of those sections is the column we anxiously turn to for the sole purpose of disagreeing with the columnist. Volubly. Until family members, rolling their eyes, remind us it’s a free country and you don’t have to read it every time.”
---Barbara Kingsolver, in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

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Happy Reading!