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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)
(Me a couple (or four) decades in the future.....Notice that one kid in the front, the only one not paying attention? That was me a couple of decades in the past....only the girl-type version....)You know how everyone has a particular phrase or collection of phrases which, when uttered, forces you to suppress the urge to cause 'death by asphyxiation' to appear on the speaker's death certificate? Okay, maybe it's just me....Anyway, I have a few such as, "Well, actually......." You just know something smart-aleck is formulating in their little pea-brain. My favorites, however, have recently become: "It must be so nice to work in a library and read all of these books!" "I should work here, I love to read!" "I just love all kids." "I have never met a child I don't like." Or, after a battle with the modern juvenile equivalent of Attila the Hun and his army of barbarians, "It's so nice and quiet in here!" I once resorted to looking in the personnel information notebook in a fruitless, futile, and quite frankly irritating search for some inconsequential particle of recycled wood product and came across a reserve stack of voluntary commitment papers for the nut-house, I mean, "spa." (Not really, but I wouldn't be surprised if I had....) Why? You might well ask. Well, let me 'splain......
Here, in abridged form, is one day in the public library:
We share the building with the city parks and recreation. Which means, incidentally, that we assist them in running their summer camps. They descend every day at 1:30 like a plague of locusts; even retired kindergarten teachers blanch with fear. Good thing no way has been found to inject chocolate directly into the blood stream or librarians would soon be attending group rehabilitation in droves. 12:59 Thursday afternoon found me steeling myself for the onslaught when the phone rang. I resisted the temptation to answer it with my most professional recording voice "We're sorry, you have reached a number that has been disconnected. Please hang up and redial." Instead I recited, "East Branch Library, how may I help you?" (person on the other end) "HELLO??????" (Me) "Hello? This is East Branch Library....." "Is this the East Branch?" "Nope, we just say that to throw people off. Oddly enough, you're the first person to catch it today. You've won 15, 000 dollars, congratulations!" The conversation proceeded, I renewed some books, looked others up, etc. "Now, is this the East Branch?" "Yes ma'am." "Alright, I wanted to come pick up some books, have you got any?" "No ma'am, we're fresh out; the delivery truck comes on Tuesdays." The locusts arrived. We resigned ourselves to metaphorical slaughter. (Remarkably enough, though we don't appear so, librarians are an amazingly hearty bunch. We've become like the speech in Shakespeare's Henry V "He that shall see this day and live t'old age/Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,/And say, "Tomorrow is Saint Crispian."/Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars"/We few, we happy few, we band of brothers./For he today that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother.") Anyway, we began to salvage our sanity and salve our wounds. A small group of stray children wandered in; one who appeared to be around 4 or 5 inquired, "Is this a day-care?" "Yes. Yes, it is...."
In all too short a period for adequate respite, the fire alarm sounded. The first fire drill we've ever had, and it has to be now. In sweltering weather in which a fish could sweat, cold blood and all. I asked the director of the practice fire drill, "What if the patrons won't get up?" With no apparent compunction she answered bluntly, "Leave 'em." Good enough. After an apparently appropriate amount of time we wandered back into the building. As we returned to our guard post at the front desk, an individual meandered rather aimlessly up to the counter. "May I help you?" "I want a library card." "Yep, I want a 1957 cherry red Chevy Bel-Aire. So?" No, what I really said was, (Smiling as pleasantly as I could manage) "Do you have any current i.d.?" "Do you know.....?" And she named some random individual. "Incidentally, no, I don't. What does that have to do with the price of eggs in China?" "She lives right behind here." "Well, that's a wonderful thing for her. You know what they say 'Location, location, location.'" "She's my grandma." "Good to know." "She has a library card." Then it hit me. This was the 'current i.d.' apparently. Well, sweetheart, I know people in California, but I don't think they'll give me a home loan because of it. The matter was adeptly handled by someone else and I dragged my nearly deceased old bones out to lunch. Yes, lunch. At 3:30 in the afternoon. But, miracle of miracles, I scraped through, at least long enough to torture everyone with this post.
(Me a couple (or four) decades in the future.....Notice that one kid in the front, the only one not paying attention? That was me a couple of decades in the past....only the girl-type version....)
First off, I LOVE the header picture. It's splendid.
ReplyDeleteMy bladder can't handle posts like this. You are hilarious and are such a clever writer. I don't know what was funnier people telling you that they'd like to work at the library to read, the lady who called and asked several times if it was the east branch library, or the kids who asked if it was daycare. I think it's the last one whose current ID was her grandmother. I actually think in the past all you did need to know was someone in CA to get a mortgage and that's why we are currently in the economic crisis. You should ease up, really, give the poor person a library card!
Hey, don't you know who my m-i-l is??? You better cough up that library card RIGHT NOW!!!
ReplyDeleteHey, if you ever get tired of the library, you can get your bus license. I'll vouch for your current id.