Charles Dickens
There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.
Og Mandino
I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness for it shows me the stars.
Arlo Guthrie
You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in.
Art Buchwald
We seem to be going through a period of nostalgia, and everyone seems to think yesterday was better than today. I don't think it was, and I would advise you not to wait ten years before admitting today was great. If you're hung up on nostalgia, pretend today is yesterday and just go out and have one hell of a time.
Anatole Broyard
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn't wait to leave.
Garrison Keillor
Being Lutheran, Mother believed that self-pity is a deadly sin and so is nostalgia, and she had no time for either.
Will Rogers
Things ain't what they used to be and probably never was.
Dr. Seuss
Carl Jung
Carl Sagan
E. M. Forster
Nonsense and beauty have close connections.
.
.
.
Stephen Jay GouldLewis Carroll
If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.
Friedrich Nietzsche
You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.
Mahatma Gandhi
Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall -- think of it, ALWAYS.
PostcardDear Nancy:
Watch those
finger nails
Mr. K
Journeywomen
Soft slumber to a silent sunrise.
The mists lift
and leave a sleeve of dew
on masts and decks
afloat above the wrecks
of ancient journeywomen.
The sun is with her.
It dances and romances
’cross decks and masts
afloat above the pasts
of jilted journeywomen.
Windless, motor down,
she drifts uneasy
by the shores,
anticipating
quicker currents
and a breeze to blow her home.
Sir Philip Sidney
The best legacy I can leave my children is free speech, and the example of using it.
Thomas Scott
A man cannot leave a better legacy to the world than a well-educated family.
Pericles
What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
George Bernard Shaw
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
Peter L. Berger
The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.
H. H. Munro
The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.
Willie, with a thirst for gore,
Nailed his sister to the door.
Mother said, with humor quaint:
"Now Willie dear, don't scratch the paint."
...Into the family drinking well
Willie pushed his sister Nell.
She's there yet, because it kilt her --
Now we have to buy a filter.
The Secret Garden
The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.
A Little Princess
She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.
Little Lord Fauntleroy
It is astonishing how short a time it takes for very wonderful things to happen. It had taken only a few minutes, apparently, to change all the fortunes of the little boy dangling his red legs from the high stool in Mr. Hobbs's store, and to transform him from a small boy, living the simplest life in a quiet street, into an English nobleman, the heir to an earldom and magnificent wealth. It had taken only a few minutes, apparently, to change him from an English nobleman into a penniless little impostor, with no right to any of the splendours he had been enjoying. And, surprising as it may appear, it did not take nearly so long a time as one might have expected to alter the face of everything again and to give back to him all that he had been in danger of
losing.
H. U. Westermayer (no photo available)
The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.
Thornton Wilder
We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Phillips Brooks
Stand up, on this Thanksgiving Day, stand upon your feet. Believe in man. Soberly and with clear eyes, believe in your own time and place. There is not, and there never has been a better time, or a better place to live in.
Amy was right: nobody ever asks about the language. They ask the DeLillos and the Updikes and the Styrons, but they don't ask popular novelists. Yet many of us proles care about the language, in our humble way, and care passionately about the art and craft of telling stories on paper.Why bring up Stephen King for a post about children's books? Because I believe children's books are relegated by many to the same kind of lesser-class status of popular novels. As are children's book authors and illustrators. I'm not sure exactly why this is the case, but it seems to revolve around a distinction drawn between writing that entertains and writing that is "Worthy."
You have to write whichever book it is that wants to be written. And then, if it's going to be too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children.Greg's commenters and L'Engle are not being overly defensive, evasive or cute. They are simply standing up for a part of the literary world that they are proud of, a part of the literary world that produces some of the most wonderful writing out there.
The Funniest Passages in Children's Lit
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I awoke this morning with a devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself to me in his gifts?
Oh yeah... This will be the first year our turkey will be prepared like this. Should I be scared?My great-grandfather was already here, and his sister listed his home as her destination. She also said she had $7.50 in her possession.Interested in seeing when your ancestors came to the U.S., and under what circumstances? Ancestry.com has the goods -- passenger lists from 19th and early 20th centuries. Plus they have census records, which are also simply fascinating.
My great-grandmother was not on the boat (why? was she already married to my great-grandfather and in the U.S. by then? needs more investigation), but her parents and sisters were on the boat and listed another of the siblings as their destination. Between the 4 of them they had $20.
My great-grandmother's parents and sisters are shown as Irish under "race or people" yet we have never claimed any Irish in our family.
One of the questions on the form was whether each individual was in possession of $50, and if less, how much. I wonder why.
Edmund Burke
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Marian Wright Edelman (two days in a row)
We may draw good out of evil; we must not do evil, that good may come.
Robert Southey
Never let a man imagine that he can pursue a good end by evil means, without sinning against his own soul. The evil effect on himself is certain.
Leroy Brownlow
There are times when silence has the loudest voice.
PostcardHi ya DinkNotes:
Arrived safely + on time
this morning. How did
you make
out getting back
to Pat? Thanks for taking
me to the station. Didn’t
work much and got enough of
rest. Lots of luck kid.
Love Brother
Alex
Thomas Merton
Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.
Rabbi Zusya (no picture available)
In the world to come, I shall not be asked, "Why were you not Moses?" I shall be asked, "Why were you not Zusya?"
Marian Wright Edelman
I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.
She stepped out onto the deck for one last look at the cove before bed. The clouds had gathered and now obscured the moon. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness before her, and during that moment she heard a sound like steady rain all around. She felt no drops, but held out her palm for several seconds just to be sure. Then as the water and the trees and the rocky shore took shape in front of her, she saw thousands of dry autumn leaves dancing through the dark night, landing on the rocks and flying against the house like so many raindrops.
Doris Lessing
The true novel wrestles on the edge of understanding, lying about on all sides desperately, for every sort of experience, pressing into use every flash of intuition or correspondence, trying to fuse together the crudest of materials, and the humblest, which the higher arts can’t include. But it is precisely here, where the writer fights with the raw, the intractable, that poetry is born. Poetry, that is, of the novel: appropriate to it.
Eugenio MontaleNarrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
...
There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
Charles BaudelaireAlways be a poet, even in prose.
George Lorimer
It's good to have money and the things that money can buy, but it's good, too, to check up once in a while and make sure that you haven't lost the things that money can't buy.
Jonathan Swift
A wise man should have money in his head, but not in his heart.
Everett Dirksen
A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(skipping the epigraph, which is from Dante's Inferno, and basically says, if I thought you might carry my tale back to others, I'd never tell it)
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
Michel de Montaigne
When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly.
A. Bronson Alcott
One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.
James Baldwin
Words like "freedom," "justice," "democracy" are not common concepts; on the contrary, they are rare. People are not born knowing what these are. It takes enormous and, above all, individual effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply.
Vaclav Havel
I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
Penelope Lively
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes — our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
Blog copyright Nancy Rae Kienzler. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
