An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part II - chapter 11
Mrs K had absorbed some of the Central Otago hill formation into her own body. Like her sister, Aunty Han, she had a mouth and lips prepared to register instant disapproval. Dad used to say that Aunty Han's mouth was like the behind of an egg-bound hen.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part II - chapter 25
I was slightly nervous, however, of Miss Lincoln, for she had announced soon after our meeting that she always 'said honestly what she thought.' Although I value honesty, I am sometimes fearful of the sharpness, the hint of aggression with which it is expressed.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part III - chapter 10
I felt that the link between the world of living and of writing resembled a high wire needing intense relaxed concentration for the barefoot journey (on knives or featherbeds) between. In such a life the presence of others is a resented intrusion and becomes a welcome joyous diversion only when the attention must be directed away from words, if only briefly, during times of travel and sickness.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part II - chapter 15
[On a psychiatrist]. I was grateful to have as my doctor someone who was not afraid to acknowledge and voice the awful though that he belonged, after all, to the human race, that there was nothing he could do about it, and pretending to be a god would never change it.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - part III - chapter 17
In my struggle to get my writing done I realised the obvious fact that the only certainty about writing and trying to be a write is that it has to be done, not dreamed of or planned and never written, or talked about (the ego eventually falls apart like a soaked sponge) but simply written; it's a dreary awful fact that writing is like any other work with the marvellous exception of the presence of the Mirror City and the constant journeys either of oneself or of the Envoy from Mirror City.
[26th Jan, 2005]
Morality for Beautiful Girls - Alexander McCall Smith - chapter 18
She finished her tea and then ate a large meat sandwich which Rose had prepared for her. Mma Ramotswe had got out of the habit of a cooked lunch, except at weekends, and was happy with a snack or a glass of milk. She had a taste for sugar, however, and this meant that a doughnut or a cake might follow the sandwich. She was a traditionally built lady, after all, and she not have to worry about dress size, unlike those poor neurotic people who were always looking in mirrors and thinking that they were too big. What was too big, anyway? Who was to tell another person what size they should be? It was a form of dictatorship, by the thin, and she was not having any of it. If these thing people became any more insistent, then the more generously sized people would just have to sit on them. Yes, that would teach them! Hah!
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Mma Ramotswe tucked the cheque safely away in her bodice. Modern business methods were all very well, she thought, but when it came to the safeguarding of money there were some places that had yet to be bettered.
A Brief History of Time - Stephen Hawking (pg 79)
A machine that was powerful enough to accelerate particles to the grand unification energy would have to be as big as the solar system - and would be unlikely to be funded in the present economic climate. Thus it is impossible to test grand unified theory directly in the laboratory.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - Part II, chapter 9
Writing an autobiography, usually thought of as a looking back, can just as well be a looking across or through, with the passing of time giving an x-ray quality to the eye. Also, time past is not time gone, it is time accumulated, with the host resembling the character in the fairy tale who was joined along the route by more and more characters, none of whom could be separated from one another or the host, with some stuck so fast that their presence caused physical pain. Add to the characters all the events, thoughts, feelings and there is a mass of time, now a sticky mess, now a jewel bigger than the planets and the stars.
An Autobiography - Janet Frame - Part II, chapter 11
South Dunedin - Kensington, Caversham, St Kilda - was a poor community where lives were spent in the eternal 'toil' with the low-lying landscape reflecting the lives, as if effort and hope were here washed away in the recurring floods while the dwellers on the hill suburbs prospered. I had taught in Caversham School and at Kensington in the school under the railway bridge, and I had seen the poverty, the rows of decaying houses washed biscuit-colour by time and the rain and the floods; and the pale children lank-haired, damp looking, as if they emerged each day from the tide.
[21st Jan, 2005]
E=mc² - a biography of the world's most famous equation - David Bodanis - chapter 7
What guided Einstein was that, in his mid-twenties, he found the unknown intriguing. He felt compelled to comprehend what might have been intended for our universe by The Old One (as he referred to his notion of God).
'We are in the position,' Einstein explained later, 'of a little child entering a huge library, whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects.'
When the chance came to reach through the gloom, and pluck out The Old One's book that had the shimmering equation E=mc² written on its pages, Einstein had been willing to take it.
[20th Jan, 2005]
Democracy and the Student - George F Kennan (quoted in Style: an Anti-Textbook, pg 127).
After the needless destruction of natural environment, I regard this - not advertising as such, but the consignment to the advertiser of the entire mass communication process, as a concession to be exploited by it for commercial gain - as probably the greatest evil of our natural life. We will not, I think, have a healthy intellectual climate in this country, a successful system of education, a sound press, or a proper vitality of artistic and recreational life, until advertising is rigorously separated from every form of legitimate cultural and intellectual communication - until advertisements are removed from every printed page containing material that has claim to intellectual or artistic integrity and form every television or radio program that has those same pretensions, from every roadside and every bit of countryside that purports to offer to the traveller a glimpse of what his continent once was and once again might be.
The Rhetoric of Fiction (revised) - Wayne C Booth, pg 73
'Theme,' 'meaning,' 'symbolic significance,' 'theology,' or even 'ontology' - have been used to describe the norms which the reader must apprehend in each work if he is to grasp it adequately. Such terms are useful for some purposes, but they can be misleading because they almost inevitably come to seem like the purposes for which the works exist. Most works worth reading have so many possible 'themes,' that to find any one of them, and to announce it as what the work is for, is to do at best a very small part of the critical task.
The Rhetoric of Fiction (revised) - Wayne C Booth, pg 75
A great work establishes the 'sincerity' of its implied author, regardless of how grossly the man who created that author may belie in his other forms of conduct the values embodied in his work. For all we know, the only sincere moments of his life may have been lived as he wrote the novel.
[19th Jan, 2005]
The Master of Big Jingles (from the thus titled short story collection) - Owen Marshall
There's no dichotomy of body and spirit when you're young. Adults see the body as an enemy, or a vehicle to be apprehensively maintained. There's just you, when you're young: flesh and spirit are indivisible. For all of us in youth, any failure in body was a failure of the spirit also.
Rosemary for Remembrance (from The Master of Big Jingles) - Owen Marshall
'I've reached an age at which the urge to meet new people has largely gone. The cause is in me rather than in others.' It was the growth of a cynicism of expectation, I suppose.
Style: an Anti-Text Book, pg 118 - Richard A Lanham
What is writing's built-in advantage if not that, in it, we can pretend to be brighter than we are?
[18th Jan, 2005]
From Every Day with William Barclay (July 29)
The capacity of great writers to work is an extraordinary thing. It was said of Southey that 'he was never happy unless he was reading or writing a book.'
Perhaps the supreme example of a writer's industry was that of Anthony Trollope.
Trollope was an inspector with the Post Office, first in Ireland and then in England. His work made it necessary for him to be travelling constantly every day. He devised a certain kind of writing pad which he could hold upon his knee, and by far the greater part of his early novels was written during journeys in railway trains.
On one occasion he had to go on postal business to Egypt. He describes the voyage, and how not even its difficulties were allowed to interfere with his prescribed output. 'As I journeyed across France to Marseilles, and made thence a terribly rough voyage to Alexandria, I wrote my allotted number of pages every day. On this occasion more than one I left my paper on the cabin table, rushing away to be sick in the privacy of my state room. It was February, and the weather was miserable; but still I did my work.'
From Every Day with William Barclay (September 16)
I have had a letter from 'Raymond.' He asks me how I get my work done. it is going to make me sound very conceited to do it, but I shall try to give you the answer.
I think that, generally speaking, there are three rules that I want to mention - though I'm sure I have mentioned these on other occasions.
My first rule is Begin Early.
Raymond is a Methodist, so it is easy to remind him that John Wesley preached forty-two thousand sermons in fifty-three years, that he averaged four thousand five hundred miles per year in travel, and that he wrote or edited four hundred and fifty books.
John always got up at 4.30 am. I can't claim to emulate that. But, though my classes don't normally begin till 11.30 am, I always leave home at 8 am, getting to my desk at the University by 8.30 am.
Without these three morning hours, I can honestly say that I would not get any work done at all. So in my experience, start early.
My second rule is Keep Going.
One of the greatest time-wasters, I find, is the habit we have of saying: 'I've only got twenty-five minutes. It's not worth starting.' But I find it is always worth starting.
To return to John Wesley, he did most of his reading on horseback.
It is amazing how much you can get done in the odd quarter-hour or half-hour. There is not unit of time that cannot be used.
My third rule is Keep to Schedule.
I have no use for the idea of waiting for inspiration. If I waited for inspiration, this book would never have been written. But when I was a minister in a parish, I don't think I ever wrote a sermon after Thursday morning.
Beverley Nichols tells of a conversation he had with Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill asked him how long it took to write 'Prelude.' Nichols said that it was written in spasms over five months.
Churchill asked if he did not write regularly. Nichols said he had to wait for the right mood.
'Nonsense,' said Churchill. 'You should go to your room at 9 am each day and say, "I'm going to write for four hours."'
'Suppose you can't,' said Nichols.
Churchill replied, 'You've got to get over that. If you sit waiting for inspiration, you'll wait till you are an old man.'
He went on: 'Writing is like any other job…like marching an army… If you sit down and wait till the weather is suitable, you won't get very far with your troops. Kick yourself, irritate yourself, but write. It's the only way.'
It is!
So that roughly is how I get it done, Raymond.
[17th Jan, 2005]
Possibly Martin Luther - quoted in Walking on Water - Madeleine L'Engle - chapter 8.
The saints (and artists) are those who not only accept, but rejoice in the incongruity and so learn that laughter is holy. The infinite disparity between God's love and man's deserts is an indubitable fact; the saint embraces it for joy. The greater the incongruity, the more wonderful the love and mercy of God. The saint does not call himself a worm because he enjoys being wormy, but because there is simply no other way graphic enough to express the richness of God and the meagreness of men...
The Galileo Connection - Charles E Hummel - chapter 13
Polanyi identifies four phases present in all fields of creative activity: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification.
The Romance of the Rascal - essay in The Common Man - G K Chesterton
The novel of Smollet's time was better than the novel of the Victorian time,
in so far as it recognised more clearly that good and evil exist and are
entangled
even in the same man. The novel of Smollet's time was better than the novel
of our own time, in so far as it recognised that, even when they are entangled
in the same man, they can still be distinguished and are very different,
and at war till death.
The Hound of Heaven - essay in The Common Man - G K Chesterton
In some aspects of art, poetry and pomp, the Catholic is more akin to the pagan; in some aspects of philosophy and logic (though this is little understood), he has more sympathy with the sceptic or the agnostic. But in the central solid fact of the subject or subject matter he is still something utterly separate from sceptics and even pagans; and all Christians have their part in him.
Two Stubborn Pieces of Iron - essay in The Common Man - G K Chesterton
Co-educate as much as you like, there will always be a wall between the sexes until love or lust breaks it down. Your co-educative playground for pupils in their teens will not be a place of sexless camaraderie. It will be a place where the boys go about in fives sulkily growling at the girls, and where the girls go about in twos turning up their noses at the boys.
[15th Jan, 2005]
Essay on Henry James - G K Chesterton
Henry James must be considered as a great man of letters; and the greatness itself is something which existed in geniuses utterly unlike him. It might seem startling and even comic to compare him to Dickens or even to Shakespeare; but what makes him great is what makes them great. It is ideas; the power of generating and making vivid an incessant output of ideas.
Essay on Henry James - G K Chesterton
He has been attacked for making a great deal of small things; the point is that the things were things; that we should have lost them if he had not given them, that he never wrote about nothing. Each small notion had the serious thing called value - like a jewel, or, like what is both smaller and more valuable, a seed.
Essay on The Boyhood of Dickens - G K Chesterton
Higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even see it.
Essay on Dickens the Myth Maker - G K Chesterton
Once the great characters are face to face [in Dickens' stories], the ladder by which they climbed is forgotten and falls down, the structure of the story drops to pieces, the plot is abandoned, the other characters deserted at every kind of crisis; the whole crowded thoroughfare is blocked by two or three talkers, who take their immortal ease as if they were already in Paradise. For they do not exist for the story; the story exists for them, and they know it.
Essay on Dickens the Myth Maker - G K Chesterton
Dickens' work is never reckoned by novels. They are simply lengths cut from the flowing and mixed substance of which any length will be certain to contain a proportion of brilliant and of bad stuff.
Essay on Dickens and Scott - G K Chesterton
In the democratic aspect of the interest and variety of all men, there is, of course, no democrat so great as Dickens. But in the other matter, in the idea of the dignity of all men, there is no democrat so great as Scott. Scott was fond of describing kings in disguise. But all his characters are kings in disguise.
Essay on Dickens the Myth Maker - G K Chesterton
There are always two types of reformer. The first pessimistic, the second optimistic. One dwells upon the fact that souls are being lost; the other dwells upon the fact that they are worth saving. Both are quite right, but they naturally tend to a difference of method and a difference of perception. The first describes how bad men are under bad conditions. The second describes how good men are under bad conditions. Of the first class or writers is Gorky. Of the second is Dickens.
Essay on Dickens the Myth Maker - G K Chesterton
Nobody was ever less optimistic than Dickens in his treatment of evil or the evil man. [There is] no attempt to whitewash evil. He crowds his stories with a kind of villain rare in modern fiction - the villain without any 'redeeming point.'
The villain is not in the story to be a character; he is there to be a danger - a careless, ruthless, and uncompromising menace. It is necessary to make the evil thing a man. He must be a man only in the sense that he must have a wit and a will to be matched with the wit and the will of the man chiefly fighting. The evil may be inhuman, but it must not be impersonal, which is almost exactly the position occupied by Satan in the theological scheme.
[14th Jan, 2005]
Temple Gairdner (1873-1928) written before his marriage. (Quoted in the Oxford Book of Prayers).
That I may come near to her, draw me nearer to Thee than to her;
that I may know her, make me know Thee more than her;
that I may love her with the perfect love of a perfectly whole heart,
cause me to love Thee more than her and most of all. Amen, Amen.
That nothing may be between me and her, be Thou between us, every moment;
that we may constantly be together, draw us into separate loneliness with
Thyself.
And when we meet breast to breast, my God, let it be Thine own. Amen, Amen.
[13th Jan, 2005]
William Barclay - quoted in An Unfading Vision, chapter 1 - Edward England
A book can be a dynamic and explosive power for good or for evil, and, once it is printed and sold, nothing can stop the dissemination of its ideas. We are in a situation in which there is laid upon author, publisher and bookseller an unparalleled responsibility for the dissemination and communication of Christian truth, and it may not be an exaggeration to say that the future of the Christian faith depends on how we together face that responsibility.
David Lange - quoted in the Otago Daily Times, 16th June 1989
We are now starting to see something of the reverse envy that we had in the years of the paper shufflers when Auckland looked to be a totally immoral El Dorado to people that milked cows who were feeling Appalachian about it.
Line from the movie, Karate Kid II
I was absent on the day they taught graceful.
The Matriarch - Witi Ihimaera (pg 56 Picador paperback edition)
[The narrator's father has just climbed into bed with him to talk.] I put my arms around him and hugged him. Fathers can be quite odd and very complex. Some fathers keep you at a distance - the shake-your-hand kind of stiff-upper-lip man. My father was different - there was a lot of physicality in our relationship. Hugging, caressing, kissing were as much a part of the physical expression of our love for each other as it was with my sisters…
We Agnostics - Bernard Basset SJ - chapter 2
I had not asked to exist and now I could not stop existing; Fate or the little old God of the Bible, or, maybe, a still Greater power dragged me along. I felt alone, futile, powerless, important to myself but lacking any importance in the vast, silent, unresponsive Universe. Astronomy had never concerned me much and the stars that I sometimes saw had seemed very suburban, but now their magnitude amazed me and I became aware of vast, silent tracts of space. I saw stars beyond stars, worlds beyond worlds, planets hidden behind planets, all apparently pointless, obeying the blind impulses of empty space. The God of my youth, thundering on Sinai, assumed the stature of Father Christmas and seemed no grater than the gods whom the Red Indians housed on an island in a lake.
[12th Jan, 2005]
Juvenal - Satires (quoted in Dictionary of Famous Quotations - Hyman)
An inveterate and incurable itch for writing besets many and grows old their sick hearts.
John Keats - Endymion - Preface (quoted in Dictionary of Famous Quotations - Hyman)
The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy, but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness.
Paul Harvey - quoted in New Testament Words in Today's Language
A father is a thing that is forced to endure childbirth without an anaesthetic. A father never feels worthy of the worship in a child's eyes. He is never quite the hero his daughter thinks, never quite the man his son believes him to be, and this worries him, sometimes.
Fathers are what give daughters away to other men who aren't nearly good enough, so they can have grandchildren who are smarter than anybody.
Jim Bishop - quoted in New Testament Words in Today's Language
Every time [one of my daughters becomes engaged] I'm obsessed with the feeling I'm giving a million-dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.
Thomas Watson - quoted in New Testament Words in Today's Language
One little word, 'Father,' pronounced in faith, has overcome God.
[11th Jan, 2005]
To Fan the Flame - Thomas A Easton - Analog, Nov 1988
Was endless progress really the point? Could it not be possible to reach some level of technology or wealth that let people say, "Enough!"
He said as much to his friend, who paused to sip his beer before adding in a quiet voice, "You'd still have to have that hunger for learning. Without it, you lose the skilled technicians you need to maintain your 'enough,' and then, Poof! Decline."
You Gotta Keep Dancin' - Tim Hansel - pg 46
[I discovered] that I had a 'blessed rage to write,' as well as live. Writing, I soon discovered, was a way in which I could taste life twice. It gave me time and opportunity to savour life again from different and unique angles. I was invited to go behind the appearances to unwrap the essence of my experiences.
Sheldon Kopp - quoted in You Gotta Keep Dancin' - Tim Hansel - pg 15
Life can be counted on to provide all the pain that any of us might need.
Elie Wiesel - quoted in You Gotta Keep Dancin' - Tim Hansel - pg 16
God made man because He loves stories.
Leo Tolstoy - quoted in You Gotta Keep Dancin' - Tim Hansel - pg 31/2
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul.
Friedrich Nietzsche- quoted in You Gotta Keep Dancin' - Tim Hansel - pg 32
Of all that is written, I love only what a person ahs written with his own blood.
[9th Jan, 2005]
Found on a blotter (!) - apparently from: The Power that Preserves by Stephen Donaldson. See discussion here.
He had no idea where he was headed but he knew he had to go. On each breath that panted through his locked teeth, he whispered hate as if it were a question.
Hot Money - Dick Francis - chapter 11
Jagged arrows of furniture stuck up from the devastation like the arms of the drowning.
Mid-Life Crisis - Anne Townsend - quoting Joyce Brothers
Men have two basic needs. Neither of them, no matter what they say, is sex. They need love and they need work. And work takes priority over love. If a woman could know only fact about men and work, it should be that work is the most seductive mistress most men ever have.
Of Other Worlds - C S Lewis - 'On Three Ways of Writing for Children'
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret, and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish thing, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
[8th Jan, 2005]
Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope - chapter 48
'It is the bane of my life that on important subjects I acquire no fixed opinion. I think, and think, and go on thinking; and yet my thoughts are running ever in different directions. I hardly know whether or no we do learn more confidently than our fathers did on these high hopes to which we profess to aspire.'
'I think the world grows more worldly every day,' said Eleanor.
'That is because you see more of it than when you were younger. But we should hardly judge by what we see - we see so very, very little.'
There was a pause for a while, during which Mr Arabin continued to turn over his shillings and half-crowns.
'If we believe in Scripture, we can hardly think that mankind in general will now be allowed to retrograde.'
Jane Austin (1938) - Elizabeth Jenkins - chapter 21
James and Henry felt it was their duty as clergymen to tell Jane she must face the fact that she might be going to die. She realised the significance of what they said, but she was 'not appalled' by it. she was thankful she had been able to remain in her right mind throughout the illness; and now she asked them to administer the communion service to her, before she might become too weak and wandering to follow it will all her faculties. All her life she had said so little about religion, and shrunk so much from people who talked a great deal about their religious feelings, that Henry thought it impossible that ordinary acquaintances could have any idea of how settled and devout her convictions were.
Search for 'Jenkins' on this page for an interesting discussion of her book on Austin.
How Sex Feels - Frank Conroy - Esquire Magazine, June 1987.
One would think that given the amount of time and energy men devote to women they would know them quite well. But for most it is a long journey. A man's need for women distorts his perception of them. He projects his created images onto them, and they are often adept at allowing him to believe they really are those images. Further, men so often bring to bear hidden agendas of which they are genuinely unaware. They become involved with a woman in order to launch themselves into a new stage of life, or to live up to expectations, or to avoid loneliness, or a dozen other perfectly understandable reasons. Men are too fragile and too involved to see women clearly without a woman's help. There is more than one way for the scales to fall from a man's eyes, but the spontaneous, honest, generous, passionate love of a strong woman is perhaps the fastest
We Are Night-time Travellers - Ethan Canin - Esquire Magazine,, Jan 1988
I have ambled on this narrow path of life bound to one woman. This is a triumph and a regret. In our current state of affairs it is a regret because in life a man is either on the uphill or on the downhill, and if he isn't procreating he is on the downhill.
Paul Newman - Lee Eisenberg - Esquire Magazine, June 1988
Paul Newman knows a lot of things that men are supposed to know about. Some of them, he says, he learned from the characters he has portrayed. So it is he knows how to spit. Beset by sinus problems, Newman is suffering from nasal pfling, so from time to time he turns his head from the conversation and lets go. Newman spits like a champ. He says he picked up the knack hanging around Rocky Graziano, whom Newman played in Somebody Up There Likes Me. He apologises for all the spitting but adds, with a wink, 'Joanne tells me it isn't healthy to swallow it.'
Shall We Dance (movie) - script by Audrey Wells
We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet...I
mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're
promising to care about everything.
The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things...all
of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed
because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will
be your witness.' [spoken by Beverley, the main character's wife]
[7th Jan, 2005]
Anastasia at Your Service - Lois Lowry - chapter 1
Her mother appeared in the doorway with an orange potholder mitten on one hand.
'Did you call me?' she asked cheerfully. 'I thought I heard someone call, "Mom".'
'I was groaning, for Pete's sake,' said Anastasia. 'Can't you even recognise a groan when you hear one?'
'Do it again.'
'GROAN,' roared Anastasia. Then she went on, dramatically, 'I am dying. I have clasped an asp to my bosom.'
'Must have been a heck of a disappointment for the asp. You hardly even have a bosom.'
Max Perkins, Editor of Genius - A Scott Berg - Chapter 3
Every good deed a man does is to please his father. (Perkins)
Anne Morrow Lindberg, quoted by James Newton in Uncommon Friends (Reader's Digest, April 1988)
Marriage should, I think, always be a little hard and new and strange. It should be breaking your shell and going into another world, and a bigger one.
Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope - chapter 33
In truth, Mrs Proudie was all but invincible; had she married Petruchio,
it may be doubted whether that arch wife-tamer would have been able to keep
her legs out of those garments which are presumed by men to be peculiarly
unfitted for feminine use.
Flying Finish - Dick Francis - chapter 5
Neither had had a scintillating holiday, by the sound of it. I overheard Conker, a much harassed small father of seven large hooligans, complaining as he loaded the cargo that he'd done nothing but cook and wash up while his wife curled up in bed with what was in his opinion, opportunist malingering influenza. Timmie showed his sympathy in his usual way: a hearty gear-changing sniff.
Dad - William Wharton - Chapter 15
'It's just destiny, Dad. Accidents are a question of bad luck. You can only do so much. There's no sense sweating it; you can worry yourself straight past any fun in life.'
'I used to feel that way, Bill; it's part of being young. It's also a question of recklessness. I looked up the word 'reck' once to see if there really was such a word. It means worry or care. As people get older they get more 'reck.' Bad experiences, accidents near misses - seeing things like we just saw - pile up, accumulate in the brain. A person becomes more 'recky' every year; continuity, survival, gets bigger and bigger.
'Also, the brain itself is changing. Certain kinds of mental and physical skills begin declining as early as seventeen.
'I've watched myself becoming less sure, Bill, less capable of making decisions. When I'm driving, I feel caught between the reckless, the twenty-year old and the inept, the fifty or sixty-year old, who might not have the skills to cope with an emergency. And I can't help projecting my limitations onto others like you, Bill. I can't be comfortable when you drive in ways I couldn't handle.'
Dad - William Wharton - Chapter 20
It's hard for fathers to wait, but you have to give boys time, they're slow. Sons are what worry a man, because most men are scared, so they're scared for their sons.
[6th Jan, 2005]
Forgiving: a poem for my husband - by Jean S Platt (printed in Marriage and Family Living, June 1988)
I gazed upon you sleeping like a child,
and when you woke to find me there, you smiled,
and drew me close. I was remorseful, then,
remembering that hurtful moment when
my tongue betrayed me, lending voice to thought
which, even then, I knew was best forgot.
But you, my love, possessed of special grace,
a gift with which you pardon and efface
imprudent words. How freely you forgive
and by example teach me how to live.
Essay on Criticism, Part III, 1:15 - Alexander Pope
Men must be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown proposed as things forgot.
Dick Francis - News/Sun Sentinel (quoted in The Writer, Aug 1987)
I find writing very hard work. I think of every word that goes down. people write to say they loved a book so well they read it in three hours. I say, 'Good God, all those months of work consumed in three hours!' It's a disappointment it goes so quickly, but of course I get tremendous gratification when people say that to me.
Eugene Onegin - Act 1:1 - English television script
Habit is a gift Heaven sends us to replace our lost happiness.
Most men's and women's epitaphs could read: 'Died at thirty, buried at sixty.'
At forty, every Christian should undergo re-conversion on general principles, as this is the period of sag. Watch those bulges - you may have God fattened out of you.
Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope - chapter 6
It would not be becoming were I to travesty a sermon, or even to repeat the language of it in the pages of a novel. In endeavouring to depict the characters of the persons of whom I write, I am to a certain extent forced to speak of sacred things. I trust, however, that I shall not be thought to scoff at the pulpit, though some imagine that I do not feel all the reverence that is due to the cloth. I may question the infallibility of the teachers, but I hope that I shall not therefore be accused of doubts as to the thing to be taught.
A Room With a View - E M Forster - chapter 3
It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave. The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected. The commonplace person begins to play, and shoots into the empyrean without effort, whilst we look up, marvelling how he has escaped us, and thinking how we could worship him and love him, would he but translate his visions into human words, and his experiences into human actions. Perhaps he cannot; certainly he does not, or does so very seldom. Lucy had done so never.
She was no dazzling executante; her runs were not at all like strings of pearls, and she struck no more right notes than was suitable for one of her age and situation. Nor was she the passionate young lady, who performs so tragically on a summer's evening with the window open. Passion was there, but it could not be easily labelled; it slipped between love and hatred and jealousy, and all the furniture of the pictorial style. And she was tragical only in the sense that she was great, for she loved to play on the side of Victory. Victory of what and over what-- that is more than the words of daily life can tell us. But that some sonatas of Beethoven are written tragic no one can gainsay; yet they can triumph or despair as the player decides, and Lucy had decided that they should triumph.
A Room With a View - E M Forster - chapter 11
Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion; we cannot tell whether our secret is important or not.
A Room With a View - E M Forster - chapter 18
[Mr Beebe] had a theory that musicians are incredibly complex, and know far less than other artists what they want and what they are; that they puzzle themselves as well as their friends; that their psychology is a modern development, and has not yet been understood.
When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough - Harold S. Kushner, chapter three.
Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, 'Hell is other people." He was a very wise man, but I think he said something very foolish on that occasion. Other people may complicate our lives, but life without them would be unbearably desolate. A leading anthropologist who had spent years studying chimpanzees in the wild wrote, "One chimpanzee is no chimpanzee." That is, a chimpanzee can develop into a real chimpanzee only in the company of other chimps. I have been observing people for at leat as long as Dr Leakey studied chimps, and I would paraphrase his comment to read, "One human being is no human being."
A Room With a View - E M Forster - chapter 1
'He is nice,' exclaimed Lucy. 'Just what I remember. He seems to see good in every one. No one would take him for a clergyman.'
'My dear Lucia…'
'Well, you know what I mean. And you know how clergyman generally laugh; Mr Beebe laughs just like an ordinary man.'
Adlai Stevenson, quoted in: When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough, chapter 6
What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable. All the observations about life which can be communicated handily are as well known to a man at twenty who has been attentive as to a man at fifty. He has been told them all, he has read them all, but he has not lived them all. What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is not the knowledge of formulas or forms of words, but of people, places, actions and knowledge not gained by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love - the human experiences and emotions of this earth and oneself and other people; and perhaps too a little faith and a little reverence for things you cannot see.
Carol de Chateau - Metro Magazine, April 1988
People like Dr Philip Rushmer, past president of the Auckland Obstetric and Gynaecological Society [are] frankly worried about what promiscuous sex is doing to young women. Once he would have prescribed the pill with few misgivings; today he feels morally bound to tell them of the pitfalls of early sex. Especially sex with many different partners.
Review of Starlight Hotel - John Parker, Metro Magazine, April 1988
There is no sex or restrictive language, so I guess Starlight Hotel
is one of those rare finds, a delightful family movie. It is certainly
not, as has been
cynically
suggested within the industry, an extended television commercial for designer
depression clothes. There are essential humanities at work, and while goodness
may be currently unfashionable, deep down weren't we always secretly pleased
when Lassie triumphed over the mountain lion and finally found her way safely
home?
Advertisement in the Dominion Sunday Times, 4th Sept, 1988.
MISC WORK WANTED
I want to write a regular column synthesizing my biblical theology and eschatology in a societal framework to be understood, in its multifarious ways, by the uninitiated. Mark Bloemgarten, Organization against anti-Christian phenomena, CPO Box 3767, Wgtn.
[5th Jan, 2005]
Graffiti found in Wellington
Waitangi - a day at the Racists
G J Griffiths reviewing Shere Hite's Women in Love, Otago Daily Times, 13th July, 1988.
The overall message is plain enough - that a great number of women (in America
at least) have problems in finding love and sexual fulfilment with their
men, and much of the reason is rightly attributed to a male lack of
understanding.
At the same time, without drawing much comment from the author, the hundreds
of written contributions silently show that the women contributors also appear
to have very little understanding of the males they write about; that they
are hopelessly unskilled in coaxing or seducing men to provide the kind of
relationship they want; and that their concept of the differences and common
qualities between the sexes, and how those differences and common qualities
operate, is not a whit better informed than that of their males.
Report in the Otago Daily Times, 26th July, 1988.
The present level of unemployment was unacceptable but the only alternative was higher joblessness, the Prime Minister, Mr Lange, said yesterday.
Beyond Sex Roles - Gilbert Bilezikian, chapter two.
[Eve] was a victim of the second-generation-believer-fadeout syndrome.