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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)
I should really be working on two thirty page research papers, but instead......
Being forced to ponder profound questions in the pursuit of an education made me think of someone's blog my mom once stumbled across. The person put forth the unanswerable question 'Why did the chicken cross the road?' and then proceeded to answer as she imagined different individuals may have answered. This was funny, as my boss and I once had a rather long conversation about how different authors would respond. I had completely forgotten about that conversation until just this morning when, without any connection to what I should have been studying, I suddenly thought about it and realized once again how much I miss the people I worked with. So, I decided to attempt to answer the unanswerable in the tradition of a few authors. (I have to 'fess up that the other blogger came up with the first one; but, not being a huge fan of Hemingway myself, I found it too funny not to include....)
So, Why did the chicken cross the road?
Hemingway: "He didn't. He died. In the rain. Alone."
(my boss and I agree that it was most likely in Spain somewhere)
Dr. Seuss: "The chicken crossed the road to pay a visit to Frog and Toad. 'Put down, put down your heavy load,' said Toad when the chicken had crossed the road. "
Nietzsche: "The chicken did not cross the road because there was no road to cross. The chicken merely imagined the road. Therefore all life is pointless."
Thomas Wolfe: "The chicken crossed the road once, but he could never go back home."
Steinbeck: "Because it was the Depression and he was a downtrodden migrant worker. And he'd recently had trouble with a woman, because all women are evil." (Has anyone ever noticed that Steinbeck seemed to have hate issues with women?)
C.S. Lewis: "Because it was a challenge and challenges build character."
Dickens: "To show that even a chicken not born into privilege can have great expectations."
Emerson: "To become self-reliant."
Mark Twain: "He didn't really cross the road; he thought about it and that was close enough-he told the truth, mostly, just stretched it a little."
Austen: "The chicken was a female born into a large family without privilege. Through her own wit the chicken was able to cross the road which divided the chicken classes. And make an advantageous marriage in the process. All through her wit and good taste. The end."
Oscar Wilde: "Because the chicken wasn't really a chicken, he was only pretending to be a chicken when city life bored him. But since you must be in earnest to successfully fool everyone, and all chickens seem to be crossing the road, then you must cross the road to maintain the guise of being a chicken-even though you secretly think all of the other non-chickens pretending to be chickens are mindless, soulless opportunists."
Tennessee Williams: "Because the chicken felt trapped in a suffocating, pointless existence and it was the only way out he could come up with. His family was stifling him and he felt unable to meet their expectations. Unhappiness breeds desperation. (And he got depressed because Stella would never answer him.)"
Shakespeare: "Because being or not being obliterated by a semi answers the question 'To be or not to be.'"
Francis Bacon: "Because although another chicken had described crossing the road, the Chicken knew he could only come to an accurate conclusion about crossing the road by experiencing it himself."
I think I need to make some friends and get out a little more............
I'm so glad you put the paper off long enough to put this up. I needed a smile tonight. I'll tell you all about it later but let's just say that this baby better be a good sleeper because it is definitely the LAST. And deserve at least one good sleeper, right? RIGHT?!
ReplyDeleteRight. As for the other two, I have one word. Benadryl. As for the "last" part......Sure about that? Positive? 100%? Yep. Okay, I believe you. This one a little hyperactive? Or is it just that two other people have to breathe in your air when they sleep, so they have to be THIS CLOSE while they sleep?
ReplyDeleteThis is classic, I say. CLASSIC. I was going to try to pick out a favorite, but no can do. I'm with Heather, I'm glad you took a breather from the papers. These are great.
ReplyDeleteHow's the basketball goal holding up, by the way?
Ha ha, those are hilarious!!! I so copied and pasted them into an email to send to my Sisters and Mom! =0)
ReplyDeletebasketball goal is holding up pretty well; me, on the other hand....if i'm not just losing it, i think someone introduced herself as nurse ratched the other day.....haha, thanks emily! glad you enjoyed; maybe i should just drop the whole school thing and write these for a living......? yeah, no, didn't sound as great when i said it out loud, either..... :) anyway, thanks! the bambino sure is looking cute with the 'tooths' coming in!
ReplyDeleteThis is great!!!
ReplyDelete