Quote From Your Current Reading

[dijinn]

I am rereading sections of Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genious at a rather slow pace. Which I'm sure as all of you know is an immotively extreme and passionately atypical work...

'Do you dream of them?
My sister dreams of them constantly. All the time, and in her dreams our parents are often cheerful, talking and walking and saying interesting things since they died. When we talk about it, when we are not fighting about responsibility and all, my sister and I sit on the couch and she tilts her head and twirls her hair around her finger and pieces together her most vivid dreams. In most of them, our mother is doing something simple like driving or cooking, and when she dreams of my father, my father is skulking around or has just killed someone or is chasing her. But every so often a dream with him in it is a nice dream. And thus I'm jealous, because I'd love to see them walking and talking again, even if it was fabricated in a dream. But I don't dream of them. I have no idea why not, and how to remedy that problem.

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Dij

[soxfan[$]]

Game Six, Game Six ... what can we say of it without seeming to diminish it by recapitulation or dull it with detail? Those of us who were there will remember it, as long as we have any baseball memory, and those who wanted to be there and were not will be sorry always. Crispin Crispian: for Red Sox fans, this was Agincourt.
Once More Around the Park, Roger Angell

[Psychovant]

The daimon's "reminders" work in many ways. The daimon motivates. It protects. It invents and persists with stubborn fidelity. It resists in compromising reasonableness and often forces deviance and oddity upon it's keeper, especially when it is neglected or opposed. It offers comfort and can pull you into it's shell, but cannot abide innocence. It can make the body ill. It is out of step with time, finding all sorts of faults, gaps, and knots in the flow of life - and it prefers them. It has affinities with myth, since it is itself a mythical being and thinks in mythical patterns.

~ The Soul's Code, In Search of Character and Calling - James HIllman, speaking on the acorn theory.

[kurt_messick]

Certainly parenthood became a religious vocation in the Reformation. Over the past few centuries, however, the mother as the 'Angel in the House' has secured her sanctification through maintaining the domestic rectitude of family members while largely sacrificing her own needs. The father's vocation as protector and provider became progressively equated with economic support and relational distance. These understandings of maternal and paternal vocation are highly ambiguous and problematic. Today, for better or worse, being a mother or being a father is often seen by the general public as largely irrelevant to spiritual practice. Moreover, it is Catholics more than Protestants who have made overt efforts to reclaim the spirituality of everyday life.

- Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Contemplation in the Midst of Chaos: Contesting the Maceration of the Theological Teacher in The Scope of Our Art: The Vocation of the Theological Teacher

[ebrown2]

"When the heavy, full of crime and bitterness, grabs his wounds and talks about death, the audience is his and his alone."

Humphrey Bogart, cited in THE ULTIMATE BOGART, by Ernest W. Cunningham.


P.S. Fr. Kurt, have you seen Mark Salzman's movie IRON AND SILK, or read his book by the same title?

[Grouch]

Originally posted by ms_n
The book was long, and difficult to read, and Klaus became more and more tired as the night wore on. Occasionally his eyes would close. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over. He found himself reading the same sentence over and over.

A Series of Unfortunate Events - The Bad Beginning,
by Lemony Snicket

Yes! That is one of the (many) times I laughed out loud during my Lemony readings. It's a great quote. Thanks for making me resurrect that chuckle.

[erik_kosberg]

From Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945 by Richard Overy:

“Silence might have protected them, but it seems to have occurred to none of them to refuse co-operation.”

[satan]

"I'm sick of people misunderstanding what a scientist is, what a scientist does."

"I'll do my best to clear up the misunderstanding."

"In this country most people don't even understand what pure research is."

"I'd appreciate it if you'd tell me what it is."

"It isn't looking for a better cigarette filter or a softer face tissue or a longer-lasting house paint, God help us. Everybody talks about research and practically nobody in this country's doing it. We're one of the few companies that actually hires men to do pure research. When most other companies brag about their research, they're talking about industrial hack technicians who wear white coats, work out of cookbooks, and dream up an improved windshield wiper for next year's Oldsmobile."

"But here . . . ?"

"Here, and shockingly few other places in this country, men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward no end but that."

Kurt Vonnegut : Cat's Cradle

[satan]

Only my grandfather was there, now. He was sitting on the floor, and he was crying in deep gasping sobs. His nose was running, and huge wet hot tears ran down his unshaven cheeks.

That upset me more than anything else could have done. Adult helplessness destroys children, or it forces them to become tiny adults in their turn.

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean : The Comical Tragedy or the Tragical Comedy of Mr. Punch

[Grouch]

When he returned to the shelter in the afternoon, Janey wasn't there. He took up supper duties, then set about preparing a special dessert for her alone. William heated sugar in a saucepan until it was pale gold, then swirled the caramel; whilst adding juice from the pomegranate, the caramel steamed and hardened and he stirred until it dissolved. He made a separate bowl of arrowroot and water and ruffled that into the mix. He cooked the whole sauce until it boiled and thickened, before covering it to let it cool. At about ten that night, he blended in the carefully shucked ruby-colored seeds of the ancient fruit, and when someone said Janey'd come back, he spooned the caramel sauce over three scoops of vanilla Haagen-Dazs.

---I'll Let You Go, Bruce Wagner

[Sordid-1]

What the hell, I'll drop in and hock a literary loogie in the sandbox of you well-read types.

This is from the exceedingly boring auto-biographical "Custom House" prelude to "The Scarlet Letter". Hawthorne, a writer working in a mundane trade to put mutton on the table, laments the obstacles "real life" places in the way of writing productivity - something with which I'm sure we can all sympathize.

"It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance."

Ain't life just like that?

[erik_kosberg]

From Richard Overy’s Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945:

As Julius Streicher stepped forward to the gallows he shouted ‘Heil Hitler’. Colonel Andrus, a martinet to the last, was heard to call out, ‘Take that man’s name.’

[satan]

Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution. In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more generally, reproductive success. If, after the aeons, what looks like progress toward some distant goal seems, with hindsight, to have been achieved, this is always an incidental consequence of many generations of short-term selection. The 'watchmaker' that is cumulative natural selection is blind to the future and has no long-term goal.

Richard Dawkins : The Blind Watchmaker

[satan]

A few snippets from the last book i devoured. Most highly recommended!

There was a current of electric hatred between the two of them that only violence could ground.

. . .

And when you sliced a single shade
into thirty thousand shadows,
then they knew you were ready,
then they called you the subtle one.
           ”But little knife, what have you done?
Unlocked blood-gates, left them wide!
Little knife, your mother calls you,
from the entrails of the earth,
from her deepest mines and caverns,
from her secret iron womb.
Listen!”

. . .

“The knife,” he went on after a minute. “They never knew what they were making, those old philosophers. They invented a device that could split open they very smallest particles of matter, and they used it to steal candy. They had no idea that they’d made the one weapon in all the universes that could defeat the tyrant. The Authority. God. The rebel angels fell because they didn’t have anything like the knife; but now . . .”

Philip Pullman : The Subtle Knife

[erik_kosberg]

From John Grisham’s The Summons:

Forrest started a tale, this one involving a shoving match in a hospital emergency room, and Ray began to drift. His brother had also worked as a bouncer in a strip bar, a calling that was short-lived when he was beaten up twice in one night. He’d spent one full year touring Mexico on a new Harley-Davidson; the trip’s funding had never been clear. He had tried leg-breaking for a Memphis loan shark, but again proved deficient when it came to violence.

[satan]

No words . . . no words . . .

He turned and gave her a true smile, so warm and happy she felt something stumble and falter inside her; at least, it felt like that, but without Pantalaimon she couldn't ask herself what it meant. It might have been a new way for her heart to beat. Deeply surprised, she told herself to walk straight and stop feeling giddy.

Philip Pullman : The Amber Spyglass

[satan]

I don't want to shame anybody, but while you lazy slugs were lying abed this morning, all knotted up in the sheets and covered with a fine perspiration, Mommy had been up for hours in her gardening apron and floppy hat, shearing great, showy blooms from the publishers' fall announcements. Whether it was that rainy spell or what, there has never been a year like this for the giant double-flowering fatuity and gorgeous variegated drivel. Is there anything you can catch from being around too much overripe beauty? I feel a little faint.

S. J. Perelman : Caution—Soft Prose Ahead

[ms_n]

Sometimes, when somebody says something so strange that you don't know what to say in return, it is best to just politely say, "How do you do?"
"How do you do?" Violet said politely.



"Optomist" is a word which here refers to a person, such as Phlil, who thinks hopeful and pleasant thoughts about nearly everything. For instance, if an optimist had his left arm chewed off by an alligator, he might say, in a pleasant and hopeful voice, "Well, this isn't too bad. I don't have my left arm anymore, but at least nobody will ever ask me whether I am right-handed or left-handed," ...



Morning is an important time of day, because how you spend your morning can often tell you what kind of day you are going to have. For instance, if you wake up to the sound of twittering birds, and find yourself in an enormous canopy bed, with a butler standing next to you holding a breakfast of freshly made muffins and hand-squeezed orange juice on a silver tray, you will know that your day will be a splendid one. If you wake up to the sound of church bells, and find yourself in a fairly big regulalr bed, with a butler standing next to you holding a breakfast of hot tea and toast on a plate, you will know that your day will be O.K. And if you wake up to the sound of somebody's banging two metal pots together, and find yourself in a small bunk bed, with a nasty foreman standing in the doorway holding no breakfast at all, you will know that your day will be horrid.

...Violet picked the glasses up, and they looked like a piece of modern sculpture a friend of mine made long ago. The sculpture was called 'Twisted, Cracked, and Hoplessly Broken'.
"My brother's glasses!" Violet cried. "They're twisted, and cracked! They're hopelessly broken...


From "A Series of Unfortunate Events - The Miserable Mill"
by Lemony Snicket

[quasar]

Once upon a time - before kings and queens were replaced by an act of Congress and when kissing a frog still sometimes resulted in more than a case of warts - there lived a young princess named Jennifer.

The opening line of Vivian Vande Volde's delightful fairy tale A Hidden Magic

Janice

[Dani257]

Must get A Hidden Magic. Must read A Hidden Magic. Forget classes and work. Must read that book.

My quote?

Librarians love dumb questions. They really do.
The Writer's Idea Book

Angela falls down on the floor, laughing.

[satan]

Rufus was her baby brother who had just come back from the European Theater. He had come to live with her because Pitman where they were raised was not there any more. All the people who had lived at Pitman had had the good sense to leave it, either by dying or by moving to the city. She had married Bill B. Hill, a Florida man who sold Miracle Products, and had come to live in the city. If Pitman had still been there, Rufus would have been in Pitman. If one chicken had been left to walk across the road in Pitman, Rufus would have been there too to keep him company. She didn’t like to admit it about her own kin, least about her own brother, but there he was—good for absolutely nothing. “I seen it after five minutes of him,” she had told Bill Hill and Bill Hill, with no expression whatsoever, had said, “It taken me three.” It was mortifying to let that kind of husband see you had that kind of a brother.

Flannery O’Connor : A Stroke of Good fortune

[satan]

Why does this certainty remain? Look at it from the Demon's point of view. His project was to deceive me about everything. But it is not logically possible for him to deceive me into thinking that I exist when I do not. The Demon cannot simultaneously make both these things true:

*****I think that I exist.
*****I am wrong about whether I do.

Because if the first is true, then I exist to do the thinking. Therefore, I must be right about whether I exist. So long as I think that (or even think that I think it), then I exist.

I can think that I'm skiing when I am not, for I may be dreaming, or deluded by the Demon. However, I cannot think that I am thinking when I am not. For in this case (and only this case) the mere fact that I think that I'm thinking guarantees that I'm thinking. It is itself an example of thinking.

Simon Blackburn : Think

[satan]

Oh this shiny new computer—
There just isn't nothin' cuter.
It knows everything the world ever knew.
And with this great computer
I don't need no writin' tutor,
'Cause there ain't a single thing that it can't do.
It can sort and it can spell,
It can punctuate as well.
It can find and file and underline and type.
It can edit and select,
It can copy and correct,
So I'll have a whole book written by tonight
(Just as soon as it can think of what to write).

Shel Silverstein : Writer Waiting

[erik_kosberg]

From Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and her brother H. Alan Day, discussing Jim Brister, a highly skilled cowboy (and frequent winner of rodeo events, including the 1947 World Championship) who worked on their ranch:

Once he had a sore tooth and asked Alan to look at it. Alan looked and saw a large dark hole inside the tooth. Alan described to Jim what he saw, and Jim said, “Okay, I’ll take care of it.” He took a fresh piece of baling wire off the roll, heated it in a fire until it was red-hot, and, with Alan guiding his hand, stuck it down the hole in his tooth. We listened to the sizzle and watched smoke come out of his mouth. Jim sat there without a word and never flinched. He was the only man we knew who gave himself a “root canal” with a baling wire.