literary quote of the day (9/25/10)

My younger brother was born on New Year's day, at the height of the influenza epidemic of 1918. My mother died two days later of double pneumonia. After that, there were no more disasters. The worst that could happen had happened, and the shine went out of everything.

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

literary quote of the day (9/24/10)

Boys are, from time to time, found hanging from a rafter or killed by a shotgun believed to have gone off accidentally. The wonder is it happens so seldom.

-William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

literary quote of the day (9/23/10)

Yes it is the dawn that has come. The tithoya wakes from sleep, and goes about its work of forlorn crying. The sun tips with light the mountains of Ingeli and East Griqualand. The great valley of the Umzimkulu is still in darkness, but the light will come there also. For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.

Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country


p.s. We might move in the direction of "emancipation from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear" if we shut off right wing talk radio and the Glenn Beck program and read good books and the Good Book instead. Or even just took a walk in the woods.

literary quote of the day (9/22/10)

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

literary quote of the day (9/21/10)

He had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

literary quote of the day [9/20/10]

"Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible."

-Leo Tolstoy, "The Death of Ivan Ilych"