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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Tuesday, May 26, 2009

So, I was really excited about going to the beach this weekend, right.....Wait, what? Hang on.....Okay, let me re-read that; yes, I did type that correctly. I just had to check. You have to understand, I am the epitome of anti-'la plage'. Not that I dislike the beach itself. Just in principle. During the summer....with the heat....and the hot sand....and no shade to speak of.....and the crush of adrenaline pumped perspiring humanity....and skinny tanned blondes in adorable bikinis....and then there's me...with Irish skin and real-life thighs. Has my point been sufficiently made? Good. Well, now that you're in my corner, let me 'splain. See, I actually was excited to go to the beach this weekend. I checked the weather.....reasonable temps. I checked the projected traffic recordings for the beach....fairly reasonable. (Okay, so I actually didn't, because there is no such thing that I know of, but it sounded impressively organized didn't it? I thought so anyway....) But the real reason I detected a slight stirring of excitement somewhere in the cobwebbed corner of my brain reserved for "summer" was this:

A remake of a 1930's-40's style suit designed by synchronized swimmer/actress Esther Williams. I was in heaven. Seriously. Even I, of all people, would don the torture device of the euphemistic appellation "swim-suit" if it looked like this. Generally speaking, the idea of folding myself into six square inches of body-hugging textile leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Makes me think less of swimming and more of drowning myself. However, I was actually, as I've said, somewhat excited.

We all met that morning, packed our vehicles and made the pilgrimage to the alter of the sun-gods. We swam, we strolled, we terrorized small children into leaving the wading pools, we ate seafood....and some of us fried like a stranded frog on asphalt. (I know, that's a disturbing/disgusting analogy, but it is the best I can come up with at 11 p.m., alright?) I applied sunscreen, I wore a beach cover-up and sun hat (all inspired by the 1940's look, naturally...) yet I still fried like Southern food. Walgreen's loves me. Aloe-vera distributors love me. Somewhere, in some tropical, third-world country, on some aloe plantation (if there is such a thing), there is some rich, fat, part-time drug trafficking, cruel, iron-fisted, plantation tyrant who loves me.....(At least I can make someone in this world happy, I suppose.) Yet, every year, I fervently pray that some miracle has occurred over the past winter months which will allow me to tan like a 6-foot, 100 lb. Brazilian model. In fact, I don't just pray to tan like one, I pray to look like one. Which is why I hate that whiny country song (sorry to the country lovers) about being thankful for 'unanswered prayers'....No, my darlings this is one prayer I want answered.

Anyway, this post was going to be me whining about my lack of melanin through a pictorial 'compare and contrast' between beautiful, exotic looking olive-skinned women and bland, pasty western Europeans......That is, until while looking for postable pictures of suitably plain Irish women, I ran across the homepage for the Miss Ireland Pageant......After the initial disappointment and irritation at the fact that it is possible to be tall and beautiful while simultaneously being pale white (curse them all, now I feel even worse....), my sarcasm appetite smelled dinner. A feast fit for kings.....Browsing through the finalists, my snarkiness rose to the occasion, replacing my downcast attitude of inferiority with one of acerbic and sarcastic triumph. I read 'biographies,' I snickered, I read more, I salved my wounded self-esteem with biting retorts...I realized I need to get a life....But hey, it was still fun.

Each 'biography' gave a name, age, 'occupation' (at least the legal one anyway), ambition, and motto. Motto?! They have their own personal mottos?! I have a motto: never have a motto. They're inconvenient, there will inevitably be an occasion in which it is useless and/or contradictory to your goals, and they smack of "all I want is world peace."

Just to defend myself against wrongful accusations of being caustic and/or intellectually supercilious in my attitude, just hear me out.

First up,

Miss Cavan

Name: Denise Matthews.

Age: 22.

Occupation: Beauty Therapist.

Ambition: To win Miss Ireland and represent my country in the Miss World competition. I would also love to be a make-up artist for the stars.

Motto: Live and let live.

I'm sorry, 'beauty therapist'?! What, looking at pictures of beautiful superficiality is going to cure the effects of a traumatic childhood now? Freud would have a field day with this one. As for 'live and let live,' I have a feeling she'd be the first one 'voted off' so to speak. Natural selection has its positive side.

Next up,

Miss Carlow

Name: Aoife Judge.

Age: 22.Occupation: Administrator/Part-time Student.

Ambition: I would like a career in the media, as a television presenter or news anchor.

Motto: You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

The only thing I have to say is this: Heaven preserve us, beauty pageant contestants are now quoting Ghandi. I comfort myself with the thought that she probably read it on a gum wrapper....which, then again, she probably doesn't chew gum; has too many calories and might ruin her perfect "Tour-guide Barbie" smile.......

Miss Kerry

Name: Helena Hanbidge

Age: 21.

Occupation: Student Nurse/Part-time Model.

Ambition: To be healthy, happy and successful in everything I do.

Motto: The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.

My question for this contestant would have to be: "So, Miss Kerry, does the future only belong to those with attractive dreams? What if some kid wants to grow up and be a garbage man? Or a plumber?" I mean, somebody's gotta be the one to hold the 'stop/slow' sign on road construction, right?

Miss Laois

Name: Sara Stokes

Age: 19.

Occupation: Student.

Ambition: To be involved in music/music management. To do charity work in Africa and follow the footsteps of Bono and Ali Hewson with their clothing label ‘Edun’.

Motto: Live life to the full and always be yourself.

I'd like to see 'Mis Laois' in some remote African village with no running water, no electricity for the flat-iron, the constant threat of malaria, cholera, malnutrition, jaundice, and typhoid.

Miss Wexford

Name: Danielle Masterson

Age: 20.

Occupation: Student – Theatre and Performing Arts.

Ambition: To be successful as an actress and do what I love. I would also like to set up a stage school.

Motto: The stars are not my limit because there are no footprints on the moon.

I won't even address this motto; it would be tantamount to singling out the weakest for the slaughter.....

So, what began as an exercise in self-pity actually ended in a rather entertaining sarcasm exercise. And hey, sarcasm acts like a tonic for some of us......

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7 comments:

  1. cherylMay 27, 2009 at 3:13 AM

    Love the suit. I am sure you'd look fabulous in it. I love beauty pagent types. They are truly a unique breed. why anyone would want to do that is beyond me. Here it is so unpopular to tan. All the face and body cremes have a whitening/lightening substance in them and everyone takes umbrellas with them every where they go. It's so interesting how different cultures view beauty.

    P.S. When I move back and have a home to hang things in I am totally buying some of your pictures. They are amazing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. RobinsonRugratsMay 27, 2009 at 2:34 PM

    I freakin' love that swim suit. Before I read the text I thought you were going to say that you made it....I was about to invest in your fashion talents!!! I know that you will be smokin in the suit. About the tanning...I think you have beautiful skin. But if you are serious about wanting a tan, have you tried the sunless tanning stuff?

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  3. The Smith TrioMay 27, 2009 at 3:12 PM

    Oh dear I must say this was by far my most favorite post. I have seen you in the suit and for everyone to hear you look hottt in it lady!!! Now on to the rest of this fabulous post...I’m not sure if it's because I'm prego or what but I literally busted out laughing at every single one. My co-workers thought I was watching something on youtub so I had to share it with the office. All of the 65 year old women in my office 110% agree and the men didn’t get it. Ha-ha. Thank you once again for this. Love ya Kelly.

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  4. MamafamiliasMay 27, 2009 at 8:25 PM

    I'm still holding out for the miz redneck pageant.

    "miz trailer park trash #1 - what is your ambition?"

    "say whut? whut'd you call me?"

    "your dream miz trailer park trash #1 - what is your dream?"

    "oh, uh, to git matching tires on all sides of my house"

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  5. AmandaMay 31, 2009 at 1:16 AM

    That weekend was a blast! I'm so glad you came with us! Please feel free to join again! And that suit looked absolutely amazing on you!
    Much love,
    Amanda

    ReplyDelete
  6. Ryan and Heather MossJune 3, 2009 at 12:17 AM

    Ha! The last was the most hilarious. I wonder how long it took her to think that up. I think of your stint in cosmetology school every time I get my hair cut. Oh, or did you not want anybody to know about that...man, there goes my one blackmail-worthy piece of info. No wonder you went to the beach with a suit like that. Super cute!

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  7. UnknownJune 3, 2009 at 2:30 PM

    old navy sells a similar top in black and i really want it! i have boy shorts because they cover my... what did you call them? "real woman legs"? anyway. loved the post! it was hilarious! i love how most of them have a carpe diem themed motto...

    ReplyDelete

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