Despair

So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—
flowers wilting on the table,
the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.

Dead leaves cover the ground,
the wind moans in the chimney,
and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.

I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
would make of all this,
these shadows and empty cupboards?

Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
my thoughts turn to the great
tenth-century celebrator of experience,

Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
could hardly be restrained,
and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces, Ye-Hah.

-Billy Collins, Ballistics, 89.

Now, Now and Now and Now

And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

-Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, 148.

A Better Place

Most people now are looking for “a better place,” which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one. I think this is what Nathan learned form his time in the army and the war. He saw a lot of places, and he came home. I think he gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no “better place” than this, not in this world.

-Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter, 83.

Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

-G. K. Chesterton, epigraph from Neil Gaiman's Coraline

Handle With Care

What you don’t hold you can’t spill.

-Van Reid, Mollie Peer, 205.

Fragile Things

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

-Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things, xii.

Advice

Never trust a man without a chin.

-Rex Stout, Over My Dead Body

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.

Walking Without Purpose

In Maycomb, if one went for a walk with no definite purpose in mind, it was correct to believe one’s mind incapable of definite purpose.

-Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 169-170.

Suddenly Five Years Old

I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.

-Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There, 36.

Long-Range Planning

In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won’t happen.

-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charlie, 777.

Giving Directions

The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.

-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley, 771.

Psalm 119

I run in the path of your commands, for you have set my heart free.

-Psalm 119:32 (NIV)

Redemption in Creation

And so, when Scripture declares, God said, “Let there be...,” we may understand this as an immaterial utterance of God in His eternal Word, as the Word recalls His imperfect creature to Himself, so that it may not be formless but may be formed according to the various works of creation which He produces in due order.

-Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, Book 1, Chapter 4, Paragraph 9.

A Story is Not a Life

A story, I see, is not a life. A story must follow a line; the telling must begin and end. A life, on the contrary, would be impossible to fix in time, for it does not begin within itself, and it does not end.

-Wendell Berry, A World Lost, 149.

Pigs is Pigs

A peasant who merely says, “I have five pigs; if I kill one I shall have four pigs,” is thinking in an extremely simple and elementary way; but he is thinking as clearly and correctly as Aristotle or Euclid. But suppose he reads or half-reads newspapers and books of popular science. Suppose he starts to call one pig the Land and another pig Capital and a third pig Exports, and finally brings out the result that the more pigs he kills the more he possesses; or that every sow that litters decreases the number of pigs in the world. He has learnt economic terminology, merely as a means of becoming entangled in economic fallacy. It is a fallacy he could never have fallen into while he was grounded in the divine dogma that Pigs is Pigs.

-G. K. Chesterton, "Logic and Lawn Tennis"

Memories

My memories of Uncle Andrew are thus an accumulation of little pictures and episodes, isolated from one another, unbegun and unended. They are vividly colored, clear in outline, and spare, as if they belong to an early age of the world when there were not too many details. Each is like the illuminated capital of a page I cannot read, for in my memory there is no tissue of connection or interpretation. As a child, I either was interested or I was not; I either understood or I did not. Mostly, even when I was interested, I did not understand. I had perhaps no inclination to explain my elders to myself...Perhaps it was from thinking about [Uncle Andrew] after his death, discovering how much I remembered and how little I knew, that I learned that all human stories in this world contain many lost or unwritten or unreadable pages and that the truth about us, though it must exist, though it must lie all around us everyday, is mostly hidden from us, like birds’ nests in the woods.

-Wendell Berry, A World Lost, 61-62.