Mike Crowl's Scribble
Pad
Quotes Archives One - August to October
2003
An obituary?
Justice Young, reported in the Otago
Daily Times, 8th Oct, 2003, in relation to a case where a family tried
to overturn a will which had given Percy Wheatley's entire estate to the
Royal NZ Foundation for the Blind.
Mr Wheatley led a 'strange and strictured life' by orthodox standards and
became 'increasingly cranky' with age.
'For instance, a dispute over money involving his brother Stan and dating
back to 1928 was still reverberating in his mind 68 years later as it is
reflected in his will instructions to the trust in 1966.
'He did not like being crossed, was mean spirited about money, had little
or no interest in the outside world, did not take newspapers, and di not
have a telephone until he was in his eighties and it was presumably required
given his declining health.
"He was not a member of any outside organisations and he did not form enduring
relationships with people outside the circle of his family. He died, as he
lived, friendless.'
Lady Macochie, in The Scotsman, 11th Sept
1967
Awake, my muse, bring bell and book
[13 Sept, 2003]
Various short entries from family members and other
sources:
Abby Crowl - quoting something
she'd read:
Ben Crowl - after being
pushed too far:
An economist after the 1985 NZ
Budget:
Dr Alvin Magary (quoted
by Marianne Moore in The Poet's Work, pge 221)
From Thruway, a children's book:
Graffiti - in relation to NZ's much debated Treaty of Waitangi:
Line from a television advertisement:
Chas, a character in a tv program called C.A.T.S
- in an episode shown 14.6.88:
Talks to Teachers - chapter one, by William
James
The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of
ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most
such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves,
if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more
articulately after we have made such mistakes. A science only lays down lines
within which the rules o f the art must fall, laws which the follower of
the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall do within
those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. One genius will do his
work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite
differently, yet neither will transgress the lines.
[28th August, 2003]
For days I've searched the Book with diligence
[27th August, 2003]
For be a man's intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume
the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some
sort of external arts or entrenchments, always, in themselves, more or less
paltry or base. This it is, that for ever keeps God's true princes of the
Empire from the world's hustings, and leaves the highest honour that this
air can give, to those men who became famous more through their infinite
inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the divine Inert, than through
their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue
lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them,
that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted
potency.
Recent and old quotations from a variety of
sources, randomly chosen, in a kind of blog.
These are the ones I listed in early
2003.
Archives
Aug-Oct 2003 and
Nov 2003
Jan 2005 and
Feb/March 2005
[8th Oct, 2003]
[7th Oct, 2003]
To curse the hand that cuttings took.
May every sort of garden pest
His little plot of ground infest
Who stole the plants from
Inverewe,
From
Falkland
Palace,
Crathes too.
Let caterpillars,
capsid bugs,
Leaf-hoppers, thrips, all sorts of slugs,
Play havoc with his garden plot,
And a late frost destroy the lot.
Libby Crowl - in answer to any question of a theological
nature:
I know: God!
On one side of a child's life their parents are teaching them to walk and
talk; on the other side of a child's life their parents are telling them
to sit down and shut up.
You don't know how much you hurt people, sometimes!
People will start looking at their liquidity horizons…
We do not praise God by dispraising man.
Then a faster bus passed us…
Trick or Treaty?
I do like hard work - I could watch it for hours.
…couple of pen-pushing nose-drips…
[7th Sept, 2003]
The following poem was found in an old book on OC Books' secondhand
shelves. It has no author, although the book once belonged to Gerry
(?) Wiltshire, who studied at St
John's College, Auckland, NZ, in 1924.
To find a passage or a reference
To match yours from Deuteronomy
Where you're empowered with autonomy
To proceed along in lower gear
For the remainder of the year.
But somehow I cannot find
A verse to say what I had in mind.
So if there's a function you detesteth
Remain absent, Neil - we will explain -
"This Year the Vicar Resteth!" [written March 1980]
Herman
Melville, from chapter XXXII of Moby Dick.