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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Saturday, April 3, 2010


Spring!  Is there anything more wonderful (as long as you ignore the fact that sweltering humidity is beginning its seasonal slow, menacing weather coup), I ask?  If I were Mr. Rogers I would answer myself by saying, no, indeed there is not, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood; now would you be my neighbor?  It makes me think of Emerson's essay Nature, "To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again."  The weather has been particularly beautiful these past couple of days.  "Balmy" is the word that comes to mind, "...Beautiful.  Gorgeous.  Wish you were here."  Which would have been perfect to put on a postcard from Williamsburg, Virginia, from where I just returned.  Every spring (and fall, winter, and ocassionally summer) I come down with a rather severe case of wanderlust.  The siren call of the open road begins to sound as good as Benny Goodman or Louis Armstrong.  Which is why last Wednesday I made the spontaneous (well, spontaneous for me) decision to take a little jaunt up to Virginia for the weekend.  Never having been to Williamsburg and remembering very little from my last Jamestown visit, it seemed the ideal place.  So, 3:30 a.m. Friday morning I packed my travel-size contact solution and camera bag and by the time the sun arose had passed the Virginia state line.  My dad was kind/crazy enough to agree to join me, so we spent a few hours blasting "House of the Rising Sun," some James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot, and the Boxtops.  The first stop was Williamsburg, which was very charming in its spring pastels.  Next was Jamestown. It was incredibly interesting; we spent quite a bit of time wandering around on the ships in the harbor.  At first I thought maybe I could understand why young boys would run away to sea in the old days.  Ships are extremely beautiful things.  The neatness and compactness has a certain charm.  It made me think of Walt Whitman's poem In Cabin'd Ships at Sea: "Here our thoughts, voyagers' thoughts./Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,/The sky o'earches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,/We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,/ The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,/The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,/The boundleess vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,/And this is ocean's poem."  It was all very intoxicating, I'll admit.  I can see how people were drawn in by the sense of adventure and excitement, the promise of something new and wonderful, barring death at sea, sinking ships, various illnesses, starvation, dehydration and mutiny.  I was converted....and then I went belowdeck.  Being crammed into a four foot square space with nearly fifty other Nike-promoting tourists I went from "Captain Ron" to "Mutiny on the Bounty" in about four seconds flat.  That's got to be some kind of record.  However, ships do seem to be very photogenic little things, so here are a few from Jamestown and Williamsburg. Beautiful. Gorgeous. Wish you were there. 


























5 comments:

  1. Wow - how right you are - beautiful, gorgeous, wish I was there. You know you're going to have to go back with your crazy mama don't you. There's no way I can pick out a favorite. I LOVE these. All of 'em. Love the ship pictures (was Johnny Depp anywhere in sight?).

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  2. great pictures! I'm sorry I wasn't able to come (and that I never got back to you)
    it looks like you had a lot of fun. the details you captured are simply gorgeous!

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  3. What wonderful pictures, and quotes, and musical references...Thanks.

    Give me a ticket to an airplane, ain't got time to take a fast train,
    Lonely days are gone, I'm a goin' home
    My baby, she wrote me a letter...

    You are funny, and fun. Why no pictures of people?

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  4. Hey, Happy Birthday - your mom's blog. I have identical twin sisters also born on this day. Much earlier but beautiful and brilliant people are born on April 19th.

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  5. P.S. They are not MY twins. That would make us triplets. Twins to each other. But you already had that figured out.

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