In alphabetical order.
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“Well, if it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it.” Flannery O’Connor
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“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. …Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing for writing, because they think they are…
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“From my own experience in trying to make stories “work”, I have discovered that what is needed is an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable, and I have found that, for me, this is always an action which indicates that grace has been offered. And frequently it is an action in which the…
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“Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning…our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. “ Flannery O’Connor, Total Effect and the Eighth Grade
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“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of…
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…the real child does not confuse fact and fiction. He simply likes fiction. He acts it, because he cannot as yet write it or even read it; but he never allows his moral sanity to be clouded by it. – Autobiography, chapter II
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When there is no longer even a vague idea of purposes or presences, then the many colored forest really is rag-bag and all the pageant of the dust only a dustbin. We can see this realization creeping like a slow paralysis over all those of the newest poets who have not reacted towards religion. Their…
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…in everything that matters, the inside is much larger than the outside. – Autobiography, Chapter II
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There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of “pretending”, when he is weary of being a robber or red Indian. It is then when he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when man is tired of playing at mythology and pretending that…
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It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen. – I don’t know where it is from, or even if it real, because I found it on the internet. I just like it.
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Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must inevitably share in the general collapse.…
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God’s Grandeur The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared…
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Gift A day so happy. Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden. Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers. There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess. I knew no one worth my envying him. Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot. To think that once I was the same man did…
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“What you have inherited from your forefathers, you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.” Tradition is what you inherit; dead tradition is what you fail to win for yourself.
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We should talk less and draw more. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Gore Vidal died. Witty bitter is not more interesting than plain bitter. Intelligence and talent with words only makes the condition of the heart contagious, and a sick heart should be sequestered, not broadcast. What makes one heart bitter but the next, equally bruised, gentle and joyous? Isn’t it the sense of injustice in the…
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“Grace perfects nature rather than destroying it.”
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He was a man, but God. David’s offspring, but Adam’s Maker. A bearer of flesh, but, even so, beyond all body. From a Mother, but she is a Virgin. Comprehensible, but immeasurable. And a manger received him, while a star led the Magi, who so came bearing gifts, and fell on bended knee. As a…
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He makes the “nature” explanation for the shape of culture, against the “nurture” case we are more used to from historians, economists, and social scientists of all types. Good insights which are new to me, such as the role of the north-south continental axis in slowing down the propogation of domesticated plants. But there is…
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“The Paschal season has never ceased to be the impregnable citadel of the classic idea of the atonement.” Gustaf Aulen: Christus Victor, p.133
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[Bold is mine.] But there is a decisive difference between the loans supplied by private lenders and the loans supplied by a government agency. Each private tender risks his own funds. (A banker, it is true, risks the funds of others that have been entrusted to him; but if money is lost he must…
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“The subjects that interested Hopkins were chiefly intellectual ones; even his most sensuous responses to the natural world were immediately referred to the intellect, which, in the poetry, meant referral to philosophical or theological thought. Although it has seemed regrettable to some readers that Hopkins grafted religious sestets onto octaves of natural beauty, it must…
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Quote Details: J. R. R. Tolkien: Nearly all marriages, even… – The Quotations Page Nearly all marriages, even happy ones, are mistakes: in the sense that almost certainly (in a more perfect world, or even with a little more care in this very imperfect one) both partners might be found more suitable mates. But the…
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“…the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in…
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Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. In…
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Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it. — Jean-François Revel, 1970
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The key to the obedience of God’s people is not their effectiveness but their patience. The triumph of the right is assured not by the might that comes to the aid of the right, which is of course the justification of the use of violence and the other kinds of power in every human conflict;…
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Instapundit.com “Chaos Umpire sits, And by decision more imbroils the fray. By which he Reigns.”
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On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity by John Milton I This is the month, and this the happy morn, Wherein the Son of Heaven’s eternal King, Of wedded maid and Virgin Mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring; For so the holy sages once did sing, That he our deadly forfeit should release,…
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“John Singer Sargent said the two most common mistakes he saw his students make were using a brush that was too small and too little paint.” – p. 26, Painting Portraits and Figures in Watercolor, Mary Whyte. Watson-Guptill Pub., NY, 2011. In subsequent posts just “Mary Whyte”.
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Over the swinging parapet of my arm your sentinel eyes lean gazing. Hugely alert on the pale unfinished clay of your infant face, they drink light from this candle on the tree. Drinking, not pondering, each bright thing you see, you make it yours without analysis and, stopping down the aperture of thought to a…
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The intimate abstraction of Paul Valery by Joseph Epstein One of the keenest pleasures of reading derives from being in the close company of someone more thoughtful than you but whose thoughts, owing to the courtesy of clarity, are handsomely accessible to you.
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“For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic…
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From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects…
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Power Line Given that poorer citizens always outnumber the rich, political philosophers have long worried that government based on majority rule could lead to organized theft from the wealthy by the democratic masses. “If the majority distributes among itself the things of a minority, it is evident that it will destroy the city,” warns Aristotle.…
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`Louise Erdrich constantly indicts the Lord for His “silence”. As if the expected next sound, after her line, would be God talking back. And I agree. Repeatedly expecting and then missing His approval is the ache in the core. This hunger is not chosen. It afflicts. She would be happier if she…
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I read “Housekeeping” years ago, and knew I was in the hands of a great writer. Since I’ve learned you can be a great artist yet an execrable person, in my cynicism I didn’t form an interest in her on account of just one brilliant book. Now comes this interview, with the comment in the…
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“…I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I don’t know how to pay attention, how to fall down Into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, Which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should…
TimothyOne 