Rancor

Confound it, rancor is a pimple on the brain.

-Rex Stout, Eeny Meeny Murder Moe

A Prayer

O Lord our God, grant us grace to desire you with a whole heart, so that desiring you we may seek and find you; and so finding you, may love you; and loving you, may hate those sins that separate us from you, for the sake of Jesus Christ.

-Anselm

It Always Rains on Good Friday

It always rains Good Friday...Always has, as long as I remember. Good Friday is a moody day...But on Easter the sun always shines. That’s the truth.

-Walter Wangerin, The Orphean Passages, 93.

In Defense of Novels

[F]or I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding—joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid pages with disgust. Alas! if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? I cannot approve of it.

-Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, 25.