Author Quotes

  • "I have great faith in fools; self-confidence, my friends call it." Edgar Allan Poe
  • "The love of knowledge is a kind of madness." C.S. Lewis, "Out of the Silent Planet" (1/8/10)
  • "...my private opinion is that after the words 'In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread; another clause has dropped out from the original text, running 'In the exasperation of thy souls shalt thou attend social functions.'" C.S. Lewis, "Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis Vol. 1" (9/17/09)
  • "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown." Ralph Waldo Emerson (9/16/09)
  • (Description of Charlotte Lucas) "Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be the pleasantest preservative from want." Jane Austen, "Pride and Prejudice" (8/4/09)
  • "Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to noone, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But, in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredemable. To love is to be vulnerable." C.S. Lewis (5/13/09)
  • (Elizabeth to Jane) "Do not be afraid of my running into any excess, of my encroaching on your privilege of universal good will. You need not. There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense." Jane Austen, "Pride and Prejudice" (3/21/09)
  • "If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed." C.S. Lewis, "The Problem of Pain" (3/15/09)
  • "Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute." Mark Twain (3/14/09)
  • "How frequently in the course of our lives, the evil which in itself we seek most to shun, and which when we are fallen into it, is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance, by which alone we can be rais'd again from the affliction we are fallen into." Daniel Defoe, "Robinson Crusoe" (2/12/09)
  • "I did avoid a critical personal examination...I referred to all the people of high standing I could think of in the community who would be least likely to know anything about me." Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad" (1/10/09)
  • "When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want." C.S. Lewis, "The Problem of Pain" (12/23/08)
  • "Let us never forget what the poor widow did, when we think we are charitable." Charles Dickens, "The Life of Our Lord" (11/30/08)
  • (Writing of champion boxer, Max Baer, in comparison to James J. Braddock) "Everything was so easy for him-but great champions usually are fashioned by adversity." Jeremy Schaap, "Cinderella Man" (11/27/08)
  • Dorian Gray to Lord Henry, "'I don't want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.' Lord Henry smiled. 'People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity.'" Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (11/18/08)
  • "Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, History would have been different." Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (11/17/08)
  • "In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less." C.S. Lewis, "The Problem of Pain" (11/14/08)
  • "Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary." C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity" (11/5/08)
  • "A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it." Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities" (11/1/08)
  • "Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect." Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It" (10/27/08)
  • "'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'" Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol" (10/26/08)
  • "The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use for oneself." Oscar Wilde (10/25/08)
  • "I have been cautioned to talk but be careful not to say anything. I do not consider this a difficult task." Mark Twain, "Nineteenth Century Progress" (10/24/08)
  • "Only keep your ears open and your mouth shut and everything will lead you to everything else in the end." C.S. Lewis, "Surprised by Joy" (10/23/08)
  • "I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least." C.S. Lewis, "Surprised by Joy" (10/22/08)
  • "Shasta's heart fainted at these words for he felt he had no strength left. And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one. But all he said out loud was: 'Where is the King?'" C.S. Lewis, "The Horse and His Boy" (10/21/08)
  • "Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself." C.S. Lewis, "The Problem of Pain" (10/20/08)
  • "If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..." C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity" (10/19/08)

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Monday, January 5, 2009

(This is a "re-post" of a previous post which I took down, as it seemed a bit too long, too sarcastic, too confusing, and, as one person told me "too full of words I have to think about/look up..." Which, incidentally, I still haven't decided was a compliment or a complaint...Anyway, here it is again, as there were some questions (okay "a question") asked about its whereabouts....)

Hello and Happy New Year! Now, this greeting may seem completely incongruous juxtaposed against the photo to the left, and may appear to hover in perilously close proximity to the uncomfortable division between sincerity and downright sarcasm, but, fortunately in this case, it has remained securely on the side of sincerity. (I decided to attempt to stem the tide of sarcasm which occasionally escapes without my consent; and, to aid me in, as Harper Lee states in To Kill A Mockingbird, "the fruitless effort to teach me group dynamics..." or, in other words, a step towards "self-improvement," which is my pitiful excuse of a "New Year's resolution," I have made a few changes in the upper echelons of the sarcasm border patrol. Yes, 'a,' I only made one; there's no need to be a glutton when so many others are in much more dire need of self-constructive lists, as they believe in the power of self-improvement. The remainder of the disillusioned, sarcastic population, who have come to fully appreciate, in all its glory, the phrase "exercise in futility" (of which I have recently learned, to my surprise, I have been named president-elect; I didn't even put in a bid. Go figure. Anyway....) have come to the liberating conclusion that A) I'm still going to eat whatever I want B)I'm not going to make it to the gym any more frequently than I did last year-which was a grand total of...let's see...365 days divided by 5 days each week plus 1 Saturday a month....simplify the fractions....which is....hmmm......zero. (And everyone thought I wasn't good at math.) C) Denying me my Constitutional right to sarcasm would be as cruel as trying to give a Persian cat a bad 80's perm. However, I have recently made the heartbreaking decision that I must put forth a Herculean effort to monitor the sarcasm, as Emily is getting to a very interesting cognitive stage in which she hears and repeats everything.......Of course, this is somewhat akin to attempting to harness the powers of Niagara Falls with a kitchen colander. But, for the sake of future generations, I must be willing to make sacrifices. (I'm such a good, self-sacrificing aunt, aren't I?)




Yet, all came to a head today (I'm so proud of myself, I clung to my resolution five whole days! That is at least 4 1/2 days longer than last year! "One small step for man, one great leap for mankind!") at work, when someone turned in The Purpose Driven Life. Suddenly, my senses were restored. The Purpose Driven Life, the book I bought along with Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, neither of which I ever cracked the cover. I'm willing to bet, though, that finishing, nay, opening "self-improvement" tomes you have invested in, which falls in the category of "finishing what you start" or "completing tasks you've set for yourself" are mentioned somewhere in both of them...I just wouldn't know where, since I've never seen the inside of either. I had the beautiful epiphany, standing there, holding this remarkable (or so I'm told) book, that I have not the wherewithal to hold to serious New Year's resolutions which are suddenly going to catapult me into the upper strata of the hierarchy of overachievers who's life-long ambition since the age of three has been to become a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. So, I have to admit that, yes, The Purpose Driven Life, helped clarify and simplify my life. Considerably.




We are told so often that a life lived without risks is a life not fully realized or appreciated, that we need to be assertive and let nothing stand in the way of what we set out to accomplish, that we should live on two hours of sleep a night in order to be able to fit in all that a "well-rounded" person should accomplish in a given day. I work best on a good ten hours of sleep, my personality could arguably be described as 'diffident,' taking life-changing risks is not my forte. I made the mistake of being adventurous with food and trying frog-legs for the first time at a chain Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C; (just as one would assume from that short description of events, things did not turn out well.) That was both the birth and death of my foray into the world of 'trying new things.' (I know, in retrospect, I probably should have started smaller....but, retrospect maintains the distinct advantage of being completely useless, as there is nothing you can act upon at that point...) Which is why I adore a website a friend and fellow sarcastrian kindly introduced me to-http://www.despair.com/viewall.html-Inexplicably, this is just my form of motivation. It is devoted to acerbic, sarcastic humor; has the advent of the internet provided anything more wonderful, I might ask? (Rhetorically, of course.) Just by way of further illustration, I have provided a few of my personal favorites.

I have discovered, then, that for some of the more unfortunates of the populace, "self-realization" and "self-improvement," both of which have gained hordes of loyal followers since Dr. Phil first aired, are not only impossible for them, but completely irreconcilable. For people like us, our "full potential," the very definition of "self-realization" could not possibly be reached without sarcasm. The very thought is unthinkable. Yet, "self-improvement" would demand that we abandon self-deprecation, irony and misanthropy, the greatest weapons in the sarcastic arsenal. One might just as well take a life-long vow of silence. So, much to my consternation, I have realized that I must choose. Not that it's much of a choice, mind you.

So, thus is written the epitaph of a New Year's resolution. Anyway, I console myself with the thought that, most likely, Emily's chances of having missed the sarcasm gene are slim to none anyway. Maybe I could volunteer my services, with the accompanying new-found knowledge, at a local self-help group....

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3 comments:

  1. MamafamiliasJanuary 6, 2009 at 7:38 PM

    I just can't imagine who would introduce you to such a website. tsk, tsk.


    The sarcasm torch has been passed (and might I add, it has served you well in college, little grasshopper).

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJanuary 12, 2009 at 4:27 PM

    So your book recommendation for some reason reminded me of "Everything is illuminated" Have you seen it/read it?

    You need to make the book posts a part of your regular blog, not just a side bar ;) That way we can comment!

    ReplyDelete
  3. JillFebruary 5, 2009 at 5:11 PM

    Kelly,

    Great talking to you today. I've got this bookmarked and signed up as a follower. Just read the author quotes so far - and loved them. Will read the rest soon.

    Jill

    ReplyDelete

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