Divine Discontent

But it is wonderful how soon you get used to things, even the things you want most. Our watches, for instance. We wanted them frightfully; but when I had mine a week or two, after the mainspring got broken and was repaired at Bennett's in the village, I hardly cared to look at the works at all, and it did not make me feel happy in my heart any more, though, of course, I should have been very unhappy if it had been taken away from me. And the same with new clothes and nice dinners and having enough of everything. You soon get used to it all, and it does not make you extra happy, although, if you had it all taken away, you would be very dejected. (That is a good word, and one I have never used before.) You get used to everything, as I said, and then you want something more. Father says this is what people mean by the deceitfulness of riches; but Albert's uncle says it is the spirit of progress, and Mrs Leslie said some people called it 'divine discontent'. Oswald asked them all what they thought one Sunday at dinner. Uncle said it was rot, and what we wanted was bread and water and a licking; but he meant it for a joke. This was in the Easter holidays.

-E. Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods, 3-4.

Fashion

No human being would willingly wear pants that zipped off at the knee—no normal human being—unless they had rocket-thrusters in place of their detachable feet.

-M. T. Anderson, Jasper Dash and the Flame Pits of Delaware, 377.

Pluck the Day

But here's the thing. Horace didn't say that. "Carpe diem" doesn't mean seize the day—it means something gentler and more sensible. "Carpe diem" means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be "cape diem," if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

What Horace had in mind was that you should gently pull on the day's stem, as if it were, say, a wildflower or an olive, holding it with all the practiced care of your thumb and the side of your finger, which knows how to not crush easily crushed things—so that the day's stalk or stem undergoes increasing tension and draws to a thinness, and a tightness, and then snaps softly away at its weakest point, perhaps leaking a little milky sap, and the flower, or the fruit, is released in your hand. Pluck the cranberry or blueberry of the day tenderly free without damaging it, is what Horace meant—pick the day, harvest the day, reap the day, mow the day, forage the day. Don't freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That's not the kind of man that Horace was.

-Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist, 127.

USB Cables

I looked at the USB cables dangling there, and I laughed pityingly at them, and I thought, Whoever designed the connector of the USB cable was a man who despised the human race, because you can't tell which way to turn it and you waste minutes of your tiny day, crouched, grunting, trying the half-blocked connector one way and the next. -Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist, 121.

Mermaids in the Plumbing

I know a boy (we’ll call him Horbert, though that isn’t his name, thank goodness), and for years he lived in a house where the bathtub had a magical drainpipe that led straight to the lost city of Atlantis! But Horbert was always in such a hurry to get where he was going that he never lingered in the bath. Whenever he got really filthy, and his mother nagged him to wash, he just jumped in and briefly splashed at himself. Then he’d spring right from the tub, and out the door he’d fly, afraid that his older brother Noah was beating his high score on Super-Space-Zombie-4000, his very favorite video game. Though mermaids sang in the plumbing, he never heard their call.

-Laurel Snyder, Any Which Wall, 1-2.

Gospel

You think the Gospel—Christianity—is something you’ve committed to, and you haven’t been consistent. The Gospel isn’t a promise you make to God; it’s a promise He makes to you.

-Joey Pensak, from my retreat notes

Purchasing Grace

...Still I feel the old clinging dirt of wanting to deal so with God that I may contribute something, so that he will have to give me his grace in exchange for my holiness.

-Martin Luther

Ballpoint and Bananas

Did you ever write on a banana with a ballpoint pen? It is a unique experience and one you will want to repeat.

-Joy Sikorski, How to Draw a Radish, 147.

Hippos on Holiday

is not really the title of a movie
but if it was I should be sure to see it.
I love their short legs and big heads,
the whole hippo look.
Hundreds of them would frolic
in the mud of a wide, slow-moving river,
and I would eat my popcorn
in the dark of a neighborhood theater.
When they opened their enormous mouths
lined with big stubby teeth
I would drink my enormous Coke.

I would be both in my seat
and in the water playing with the hippos,
which is the way it is
with a truly great movie.
Only a mean-spirited reviewer
would ask on holiday from what?

-Billy Collins, Ballistics, 42.

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.