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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Sunday, July 25, 2010

I don't know if there are any statistics to vindicate my opinion, but I have an extremely deeply rooted opinion that hot weather, truly sweltering weather, makes people crazy.  And it's not just the whole 'three days in the desert and you start seeing ice cream stands' kind of crazy.  We've been topping 100 on the thermometer for the past few hundred years, or at least since the middle of July.  As if in synchronization, insanity begins to show glimpses of itself, finally revealing its face in all of its glaring glory just as the needle quivers over the '100' mark.  And then, when all outdoor activity is rendered impossible by threats of dehydration, heat stroke, and death, everyone simultaneously descends upon the library. 
If I or any of my co-workers actually knew how to play poker it is a given that we could never play each other; after a few days like these past few, we all know the stress induced tics and muscle spasms of the others.  In a group-therapy kind of way it brings us a bit closer together; something about the shared sympathy among soldiers as you watch a building full of heat-crazed 'people' rattling the bars of their cages. 
Think I'm exaggerating?  Let me take you down the rabbit-hole, then......
Just the other day, any typical day, we had a swarm of children, led by none other than Conan the Barbarian himself, fall on us in the wrath of boredom.  I grabbed my whip, chair and black top-hat.  "Don't turn that off, please!"  "Don't press that button!"  "Stay on your side of the counter, please!" "No running!"  "Don't stand up on the couch, it'll tip over.....Actually, you know what, go ahead.  Have at it with that one....."  "When did you last wash your hands?"  "Where are your shoes?"  "Where is your mother?!" "Don't point the scanner at your eyes unless you want grow up to be Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder......"  etc. etc.  Having sucked down about five bottles of water that day, due to the heat, I took a short break and walked back to the staff restroom.  The door was closed and I heard the sound of running water, and knowing that two of my co-workers were at the front desk, I assumed it was the third.  I walked back out to the desk, patiently awaiting my turn with some slight sense of building panic.  Suddenly, the third co-worker appeared.  Now, I'm definitely more of an English person than math, but I can count to four.  Being neither a math person nor Sherlock Holmes in the powers of deduction, I was still able to grasp that something was amiss....all four were at the desk, but water was running in the restroom......did I really want to know?  I knocked on the door, and, receiving no answer, proceeded to open it.  No one.  Nothing.  Only the toilet is making a rather strange sound......I removed the 'lid,' but saw nothing amiss.  I went back out to inform my boss, and was detained by a patron.  Finishing with the patron, I made my way towards the back, only to be met by a sound which seemed somewhat out of place.  I didn't know why, or even what the sound was reminiscent of....Then it hit me.  The eruptions of Mt. St. Helen and Old Faithful.  A new island being created in the tropics.  The sound of a toilet spewing water ceiling high.  Panic and disgust pushed aside, we combined efforts and attempted to stem the angry tide.  The floor was now half an inch deep; fortunately it was clean water.  4:30 found me with mop and bucket, swabbing deck.  As I'm attempting to soak up the remains of Hurricane Katrina of the public library, a co-worker stepped back and informed us that there had been a shooting in the neighborhood and the perpetrator was not as yet apprehended; the police suggested we lock the doors.  Great, I am shoe-deep in toilet water and now on lock-down.  At 4:30.  Thirty more minutes and I would've been home-free.  Just then I heard the metallic tinkling of the ice-cream truck making its afternoon rounds.  Playing, I kid you not, Christmas carols.  "Deck the Halls," to be precise.  It was like something straight from hades.  For some reason the metallic sound of mechanized music reminds me of some 1950's horror movie.  You can just see it: half a dozen or so All-American be-sweatered and saddle-oxford sporting Bobby-Soxers enjoying a day at the fair.  That same metallic tinkling commences, strangely juxtaposed and ominously foreshadowing the coming slaughter.  Finished with the floor, I went back to the counter, where my boss was, to inform her of as much, and ask if Public Works was on its way.  (Hope springs eternal.)  As I approached, I became privy to a conversation between my boss and a child who was in the act of asking my boss what her favorite swear word is......Today's not a good day to ask that, Tonto, you might get an answer.  I was called away by a man who needed to apply for a library card.  As I was filling out the information in our system, he began casually chatting.  "You know," he said, "I don't think I could work in a library....."  Apparently this was not a rhetorical statement, as he waited in vain for a moment for me to ask why.  "I would get too bored.....Just sitting here all day like this, and I don't really like to read that much......"
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4 comments:

  1. Stuff 'N PlunderJuly 25, 2010 at 8:04 PM

    Which brings me to a quote I read in the book I borrowed from you (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)

    ..."Later, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

    No...eight days a week."

    Do you have an opinion on that?

    But guess what, everybody out there in ReaderLand - she really does like her job. I know, because of the ones she comes home and tells me about - the ones that grab her heart. The ones she wishes she could help in some way. And the ones who do kind things for her. This particular day was just one of those "move to Australia" kinds of days. And this was too funny not to share.

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  2. Tim O'KeefeJuly 29, 2010 at 3:58 PM

    HA! I think I begin a lot of my comments with that syllable. This would be a cool short story. I mean it is a short story, but a longer one. Or maybe a novel. Or am I repeating myself?

    It is funny because it is real. But with your wit attached it is hilarious. I sense just a touch of Stephen King in here. I know that you like the classics, but have you ever read "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption"? Or "The Body"? One of his early short stories was about a library dragon. I forget the title.

    I didn't get a chance to comment on your last post. How about , "At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring. Inman's eyes and the long wound at his neck drew them..." Or, "Pittsburg was darkness. The taste of smoke in one's throat and heavy smog and black soot." That is from Cynthia Rylant's I Had Seen Castles - one of the best 100 page books I have ever read. Of course, "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow." Or, "'Where's Papa going with that ax?' said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.'" No child shall ever have me for a teacher without hearing that first line.

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  3. cherylJuly 31, 2010 at 7:06 PM

    Oh my goodness-you just made my day. You are hilarious. You truly have a gift of retelling an event. What luck and what are the chances of that guy making that comment to you. Sorry you had to clean up the aftermath of toilet katrina. I can't believe there was shooting in the neighborhood. I think there is more crime in Greenville than in this city of 4.5 million. Glad everything was ok.

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  4. Ryan and Heather MossAugust 2, 2010 at 2:12 PM

    Because, after all, all you guys do is sit there & read all day long.

    Love ya! Glad I didn't know about the shooting (or that we were there that afternoon-I'd have been freaking out). Yeah, I don't think I'm cut out for library work either...

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