Settling for Less

The great sin of most of the stories of popular culture—in film, television, novels, and the like—is not that they are violent or obscene or godless, but that they waste our time. Since I can hear only so many stories in my life, why settle for anything less than the best ones?

-Daniel Taylor, "In Praise of Stories," The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken, 417.

Anthologies

And so of the making of books there is no end, and of the making of anthologies there seems particularly to be no end because we are all anthologists. The collection and hoarding of bits and pieces is basic to all animals, from the squirrel with his nuts...to the anthologist with his oddments stored up in his memory...Anthology-making is therefore essentially selfish, like self-preservation...with the advantage of literature over nuts that it can be shared without personal loss to the hoarder.

-Elizabeth Goudge, preface to A Book of Comfort, quoted by Leland Ryken in his preface to The Christian Imagination

Review: The Christian Imagination, ed. Leland Ryken

I stumbled across this book last weekend, as I perused Wheaton's card catalog in search of lesser-known essays by some of my favorite authors (Buechner, Chesterton, O'Connor, etc...). This is a marvelous book, exploring literature as an art-form from a Christian perspective. I'm sorry I didn't have time to read it more thoroughly (alas, 500 pages or so), but I had a lovely browse, and copied out as many quotes as I could - many from Lewis, but a few from other sources too. Some are posted below, and there will be more over the next few days...