I Understand Completely

"All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes--characters even--caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you. Well, it was like that."

--from Dian Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale

Wish I'd Said That

"To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly talk gently, act frankly . . . to listen to stars and buds, to babes, and sages, with open heart; await occasions, hurry never . . . this is my symphony." --William Henry Channing

Fully Human

" My chosen vocation . . . [has] remained a subset of a larger vocation, which was the job of loving God and neighbor as myself. Over the years I have come to think of this as the vocation of becoming fully human.

Since some people consider being human a liability, and 'fully'would only make things worse, I should perhaps explain what I mean. To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that 'I'm only human' does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as a blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.

'The glory of God is a human being fully alive,' wrote Irenaeus of Lyons some two thousand years ago. One of the reasons I remain a Christian-in-progress is the peculiar Christian insistence that God is revealed in humankind--not just in human form but also in human being."

---Barbara Brown Taylor in An Altar in the World

Righteous Indignation

I never thought of it quite this way before:

" . . . the wrath of God is a symbol of holy mystery that we can ill afford to lose. For the wrath of God in the sense of righteous anger against injustice is not an opposite of mercy but its correlative. It is a mode of caring response in the face of evil, aroused by what is mean or shameful or injurious to beloved human beings and the created world itself. Precisely because Holy Wisdom cares with a love that goes beyond our imagining, the depths of divine anger are likewise immeasurable. . . . [Divine anger] stands as an antidote to sentimentality in our view of God's holy mystery as love . . ." Elizabeth A. Johnson

Wish I'd Said That

"The hardest thing about writing is telling the truth. Maybe it's the hardest thing about being a woman, too." ---Sue Monk Kidd

No Gleanings from Twilight

I know I said I was through with Twilight, but I just can't help myself. If you remember, I've done a recurring post called "Gleanings from My Readings" with beautiful or profound or funny or interesting quotes from whatever I've read lately--magazines, poetry, newspapers, novels, whatever. (At least, I've done it when I haven't been so immersed in writing that my reading life is nonexistent.) But I just spent almost two weeks reading Meyer's four novels, and although I almost always read with a pencil in hand to underline great sentences or make marginal notes, it didn't take long to find out I didn't need one for the Twilight saga--around 2000 pages without one passage begging me to underline it. Pretty sad. Well, I was tempted to underline for repetitive word use and make nasty comments in the margin, but that was just the editor in me coming out.

So, in honor of my tradition, here are some *great* lines from Twilight. Please feel free to guffaw loudly.

And, no, I didn't waste my time gathering these quotes myself. You can find them and more at Twilight Quotes. Ready? Here you go:

Edward's Best Lines:

Bella: You were right. Edward: I usually am, but about what in particular this time?

Perhaps something more private?

Do I dazzle you?

Your number was up the first time I met you.

I don't want to hear that you feel that way. It's wrong. It's not safe. I'm dangerous, Bella - please, grasp that.

You were right - I'm definitely fighting fate trying to keep you alive.

Do you really believe that you care more for me than I do for you?

Darkness is so predictable, don't you think?

I can be patient - if I make a great effort.

I'm the world's best predator, aren't I? Everything about me invites you in - my voice, my face, even my smell. As if I need any of that! As if you could outrun me. As if you could fight me off.

Don't be afraid. I promise ... I swear not to hurt you.

So where were we, before I behaved so rudely?

You are exactly my brand of heroin.

You are the most important thing to me now. The most important thing to me ever.

Edward: And so the lion fell in love with the lamb ... Bella: Stupid lamb. Edward: Sick, masochistic lion.

As you are not addicted to any illegal substances, you probably can't empathize completely.

Are you still faint from the run? Or was it my kissing expertise?

Edward: Bella, I've already expended a great deal of personal effort at this point to keep you alive. I'm not about to let you behind the wheel of a vehicle when you can't even walk straight. Besides, friends don't let friends drive drunk. Bella: Drunk? Edward: You're intoxicated by my very presence.

Just because I'm resisting the wine doesn't mean I can't appreciate the bouquet.

I may not be a human, but I am a man.

Your hair looks like a haystack ... but I like it.

I could hardly leave in the clothes I came in - what would the neighbors think?

Bella: I love you. Edward: You are my life now.

What am I going to do with you? Yesterday I kiss you, and you attack me! Today you pass out on me!

You're worried, not because you're headed to meet a houseful of vampires, but because you think those vampires won't approve of you, correct?

It seems I'm going to have to tamper with your memory.

If you let anything happen to yourself - anything at all - I'm holding you personally responsible.

They gave you a few transfusions. I didn't like it - it made you smell all wrong for a while.

Bella: You stole a car? Edward: It was a good car, very fast.

Bella: Edward I honestly can't dance! Edward: Don't worry silly. I can.

Twilight, again. Another ending. No matter how perfect the day is, it always has to end.

Bella's Best Lines:

Stupid, shiny Volvo owner.

I thought you were supposed to be pretending I don't exist, not irritating me to death.

And how long have you been seventeen?

I fall down a lot when I run.

I do have some trouble with incoherency when I'm around him.

Sometimes it seems like you're trying to say goodbye when you're saying something else.

I'm absolutely ordinary - well, except for bad things like near-death experiences and being so clumsy that I'm almost disabled.

His eyes did that unfair smoldering thing again.

Did they know that I knew? Was I supposed to know that they knew that I knew, or not?

My decision was made, made before I'd ever consciously chosen, and I was committed to seeing it through. Because there was nothing more terrifying to me, more excruciating, than the thought of turning away from him.

Edward: I was thinking, while I was running ... Bella: About not hitting trees, I hope.

It's an off day when I don't get somebody telling me how edible I smell.

I need another human minute.

Vampires like baseball?

Edward: Now, what exactly are you worrying about? Bella: Well, um, hitting a tree - and dying. And then getting sick.

It would be nice if I could find just one thing you didn't do better than everyone else on the planet.

Don't I taste as good as I smell?

I was not finished kissing you. Don't make me come over there.

Are you tired of having to save me all the time?

A man and woman have to be somewhat equal ... as in, one of them can't always be swooping in and saving the other one. They have to save each other equally.

You are my life. You're the only thing it would hurt me to lose.

I'm not coming over anymore if Alice is going to treat me like Guinea Pig Barbie when I do.

In what strange parallel dimension would I ever have gone to prom of my own free will?

Other Best Lines:

Jake: You wouldn't happen to know where I could get my hands on a master cylinder for a 1986 Volkswagen Rabbit?

Mike: He looks at you like ... like you're something to eat.

Alice: It sounded like you were having Bella for lunch, and we came to see if you would share.

Renee: Try to be more careful when you walk, honey, I don't want to lose you.

Now, aren't you just dying to read this literary treasure?

First Lines, Final Installment

Here's the last 25 of the 100 Best First Lines:

76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. � Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. � Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)

78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. � L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)

79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. � Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

80. Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. � William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)

81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. � J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)

82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. � Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)

83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." � Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)

84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. � John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)

85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. � James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)

86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. � William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)

87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. � Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)

88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. � Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)

89. I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. � Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. � Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)

91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. � John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)

92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. � Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)

93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. � Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)

94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. � Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person--a shy young man about of 19 years old--who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle--a journalist, fluent in five languages--who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man--a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school--that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.--Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)

96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. � Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)

97. He--for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it--was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. � Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)

98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. � David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)

99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. � Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. � Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

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!

Gleanings from My Readings

“What a delightful library you have at Pemberly, Mr. Darcy!”

“It ought to be good,” he replied, “it has been the work of many generations.”

“And then you have added so much to it yourself, you are always buying books.”

“I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these.”

---Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice

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“The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life . . . This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.”
---Caitlin Flanagan, in “What Girls Want,” The Atlantic, December 2008

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“Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but for a naturalist he is wrong. For a naturalist, it is the examined life that is not worth living.”
---James W. Sire, in The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog

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Academic postmodernism is “a loosely structured constellation of ephemeral disciplines like cultural studies, gay and lesbian studies, science studies and post-colonial theory . . . that borrows freely from a host of works (in translation) by such scholars as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. . . . Given the impossibility of imposing logical order on ideas as dissimilar as these, postmodernism is long on attitude and short on argument.”
---Mark Lilla, in “The Politics of Jacques Derrida,” New York Review of Books, June 25, 1998

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
---Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey

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“Reading from a monitor, instead of a book, is like playing videogame football instead of tossing a football around.”
---Roy Blount, Jr., in Alphabet Juice

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“It’s magic to see Spirit, largely because it’s so rare. Mostly you see the masks and the holograms that the culture presents as real. You see how you’re doing in the world’s eyes, or your family’s, or—worst of all—yours, or in the eyes of people who are doing better than you—much better than you—or worse. But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You’re not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You’re here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill—and we’re all terminally ill on this bus—what will matter are memories of beauty, that people loved you, and that you loved them.”
---Anne Lamott, in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

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“Highly credible people make decisions to ‘suspend judgment’ when considering another person’s perspective. They do this because they are okay with being wrong—or, at bare minimum, okay with having their opinions challenged. This doesn’t mean they don’t have passion and strong beliefs. It simply means that their minds are open to other opinions, even if those are quite different from their own.”
---Sandy Allgeier, in The Personal Credibility Factor

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“Hillary’s campaign illustrates how far we’ve come, and how far we haven’t come. The tone and tenor of the debates around Hillary, and around Sarah Palin, was far more personal and mocking than toward their male counterparts. Maybe the material was richer, but there was no attempt to dance around gender issues the way there is with race. As a society, we still condone sexism; we view it as a part of nature, a given that isn’t worth bothering our pretty heads about.”
---Eleanor Clift, in “Suffrage, Hillary Style,” Newsweek 1/27/09 Commemorative Inaugural Edition

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“Consideration & Esteem as surely follow command of Language, as Admiration waits on Beauty.”
---Jane Austen, in Lady Susan

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“History is most responsibly understood as a mosaic of probabilities or as something like a babble of voices from which emerges a fallible consensus of opinion. Narratives give us focused, if varied, points of view, and storytellers elide, forget and filter whatever facts they believe they possess. About the best you can hope for in a movie’s presentation of history is that it is not an overt lie.”
---Philip Martin, columnist for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, in his article “Defiance Is Riveting Drama; Is It History, or Its Shadow?” 1/20/09

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“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the sad feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”
---Andrew Wyeth, American artist

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“There is, of course, a cognitive disconnect to reading poetry to an audience numbering in the millions, as Alexander did. Most poets never reach that many people in a lifetime, which may have something to do with the choice to keep her focus simple, her imagery direct. Even so, the crowd began dispersing well before she was finished, as if her words were little more than an afterthought. Partly, that has to do with her placement on the program—after the president; she had the misfortune of following the main event. But even more, it suggests the tangential role of poetry in our national conversation, which is unlikely to change no matter how seriously this president, or any other, takes the written word.”
---David L. Ulin, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, in his article “The Poem That Failed”

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Elizabeth Alexander’s Inaugural Poem:
“Praise Song for the Day”

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

"We do not look in our great cities for our best morality."
---Jane Austen

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“Nearly all of us . . . are offended by violations of some kinds of linguistic taboos. Political conservatives tend to be more offended by profanities and obscenities, whereas liberals tend to be more offended by racial and ethnic slurs as well as by slurs against homosexuals. Pinker says that words are arbitrary labels and that linguistic taboos embody a kind of magical misconception about language. In fact, though, speakers within a linguistic community typically show widespread agreement about the relative offensiveness of words. Linguistic taboos are real, then, not magical.”
---Gilbert Youmans, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Missouri, in a letter to the editor of The Atlantic (Jan/Feb 2009)

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“[Both my mother and the librarian] taught me that if you insist on having a destination when you come into a library, you’re shortchanging yourself. . . . I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life, and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storms of our families and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows or creeks: sacred space.”
---Anne Lamott, in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

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“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”
---William Hazlitt, in his essay “On Wit and Humour”

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“Language is to some extent tendentious. This is what we have to work with. Think of words in terms of foodstuffs: whatever we cook up won’t be composed of pure nutrients: it will derive from odd life-forms that breathe underwater of grow in the ground. But we can use fresh, organic ingredients, we can wash contaminants off them, and we can avoid globbing them up with heavy batter and frying them in oils that clog our arteries. Actually, it’s a lot harder to do that with words than with trout or carrots, but it’s the goal for an honest writer to aspire to.”
---Roy Blount, Jr., in Alphabet Juice

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Happy Reading!

Disagreeing with Dr. Johnson

I admire Samuel Johnson. I really do. A man who can compile a Dictionary of the English Language in seven years with exacting precision is hardly to be argued with. But I am today.

Dr. Johnson wrote:

Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topicks of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression. Of sentiments purely religious, it will be found that the most simple expression is the most sublime. Poetry loses its lustre and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more excellent than itself. All that verse can do is to help the memory, and delight the ear, and for these purposes it may be very useful; but it supplies nothing to the mind. The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for fiction, and too majestick for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere.

I don’t claim to have the analytical powers of Dr. Johnson, but I do have a few things to say in rebuttal: John Donne. George Herbert. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Christina Rosetti.

Have anything to add to the argument?

Gleanings from My Readings

“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”
---Jane Austen, in Persuasion

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NEW WORD: orthorexics—people with an unhealthy obsession with healthy eating

“...nutritionist thinking has become so pervasive as to be invisible. We forget that, historically, people have eaten for a great many reasons other than biological necessity. Food is also about pleasure, about community, about family and spirituality, about our relationship to the natural world, and about expressing our identity. As long as humans have been taking meals together, eating has been as much about culture as it has been about biology.”
---Michael Pollan, from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

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“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.”
---Aldous Huxley, novelist

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“To me the mark of a great book is that it can move a variety of people, even though each person is connecting in a different way. The purpose of a story is to be a crowbar that slides under your skin and, with luck, cracks your mind wide open.”
---Jodi Picoult, novelist

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From Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress”:

“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
[. . .]
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”

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From Henry Vaughan’s poem “The World”:

“I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world
And all her train were hurled . . .”

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

Since I’ve been reading Jane Austen all week, I thought I’d share some witty quotes. Enjoy!

From a letter to her sister Cassandra:

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”

From Sense and Sensibility:

“There are certainly not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them.”

From Pride and Prejudice:

“It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?”

From Northanger Abbey:

“A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”

From Emma:

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”

From Mansfield Park:

“Nobody minds having what is too good for them.”

From Persuasion:

“To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.”

Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
---Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice

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“Fortunately, I enjoy fooling with letters, moving them around, going back and forth over them, over and over, screaming . . . The terrible thing about writing is also the great thing about it: you can keep on changing it. ‘We say that we perfect diction,’ wrote Wallace Stevens. ‘We simply grow tired.’ But it’s a good tired.”
---Ray Blount, Jr., in the Introduction to Alphabet Juice

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“A powerful agent is the right word . . . Whenever we come upon one of these intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.”
---Mark Twain

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“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”
---William Faulkner

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“She tried to remember that last time she’d tucked herself in to the pages of a good book or outsmarted a crossword puzzle or patronized the musicians in the park of been mindless in a movie theater or drunk on a poem.”
---Patricia Cornwell, in her latest novel Scarpetta

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From Robert Herrick’s poem “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time”: (1648)

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.”

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From Ben Jonson’s poem “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare”:

“He was not of an age, but for all time!”

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Happy Reading!

Let the Flailing Begin

If you’ve been reading my “Gleanings from My Readings” posts lately, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve found Anne Lamott to be an especially quotable writer. In her book Plan B: More Thoughts on Faith, she observes, “I know that with writing, you start where you are, and you flail around for a while, and if you keep doing it, every day you get closer to something good.”

Well, I’m ready. I let myself have a couple of weeks off, for several reasons. One is that I haven’t really taken any time off from my studies since I began three years ago. Another is that I wanted to enjoy my family over the holidays. And the final reason is that I just can’t work in fits and spurts. When I write, it becomes my second religion—I have to do it with my whole heart, mind, and soul, and I knew I couldn’t devote that kind of uninterrupted time to my dissertation during the holiday season.

But it’s over now. This is the last lap. I’m ready. Let the flailing begin.

Gleanings from My Readings

“If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.”
---Jane Austen, in Mansfield Park

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“Direct and honest communication by an intelligent writer is more nourishing than partisan, dishonest theory.”
---Marc Smirnoff, editor of The Oxford American

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“As I’m writing, I’m always reader-conscious. I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I’m talking to, and I want to make sure I don’t talk too fast or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong.”
---Billy Collins

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“I thought I’d save it for the weekend, but maybe, just take a peek at it that night, you know, just to confirm my original suspicions. Five hours later, I’m a third of the way through the book. By the end of the weekend, I’m forcing myself to slow down so I won’t gobble the whole thing.”
---Sarah Prickett, about Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love

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“If there’s anything more punishing than writing a book, it’s being married to someone who’s writing a book.”
---Meghan Daum, essayist and novelist

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From Steve Kowit’s poem, “The Grammar Lesson”:

“See? There’s nothing to it. Just
memorize these rules . . . or write them down!
A noun’s a thing, a verb’s the thing it does.” (16-18)

Kinda reminds you of Grammar Rock, doesn’t it?

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“Monet Refuses the Operation”

Doctor, you say that there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and changes our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

~ Lisel Mueller ~
(Sixty Years of American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets)

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”
---Jane Austen, in Persuasion

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean, nothing more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
---Lewis Carroll

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“One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality. Good prose is like a window pane.”
---George Orwell

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“A book is still [an] incredibly lovely, respectable gift.”
---Jamie Raab, publisher

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“It took me a long time, into my sixties, to own my own narrative.”
---Jane Fonda

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“I think that people have not been reading for the past year because they’ve been checking political blogs every 20 minutes. At some point, I think people are going to say, ‘You know what, this is not nourishing.’ I think and I hope—and maybe it’s just blind hope—I think there is a yearning for authenticity out there, and people are going to go back to the things that really matter, and one of those things, I hope, will be reading books.”
---Larry Weissman, literary agent

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“Barn’s burnt down—
Now I can see the moon.”
---Masahide (17th century Japanese poet)

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Happy Reading!

Gleanings from My Readings

“But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.”
---Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey

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“Arabella, whose Delicacy was extremely shocked at this abrupt Declaration of her Father, could hardly hide her Chagrin; for, tho’ she always intended to marry some time or other, as all the Heroines had done, yet she thought such an Event ought to be brought about with an infinite deal of Trouble; and that it was necessary she should pass to this State thro’ a great Number of Cares, Disappointments, and Distresses of various Kinds, like them; that her Lover should purchase her with his Sword from a Croud of Rivals; and arrive to the Possession of her Heart by many Years of Services and Fidelity.”
---Charlotte Lennox, in The Female Quixote (1752)

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“I keep thinking about a story I heard somewhere. A child asks an old woman why she looks the way she does. “Because I’ve been living,” she says. A long life is a beautiful thing.”
---Judy Kirkwood

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He who lends a book is an idiot. He who returns the book is more of an idiot. ~ Arabic Proverb

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From Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

Horatio: My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral.

Hamlet: I prithee do not mock me, fellow student,
I think it was to see my mother’s wedding.

Horatio: Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.

Hamlet: Thrift, thrift, Horatio, the funeral bak’d meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.

(I can't help it. These are my favorite lines in the play.)

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Happy Reading!