Quotation [quotidian] Journal: from Lord Peter Wimsey

Monday, July 23, 2012

from Lord Peter Wimsey

"...and, after all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays. Don't you agree?"

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Quote,

"Books are quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers." --Charles William Eliot

"You never know what you'll want to write until it starts writing itself in your head." --Jill Ker Conway

"Expect the best, and walk so discreetly as to invite it, and then leave all to God." --Brother Cadfael (Ellis Peters, a.k.a. Edith Pargeter)

"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds that you plant." --Robert Louis Stevenson

"Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Everything is simpler than one can imagine, and yet complicated and inter-twined beyond comprehension." --Goethe

"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that something deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit." --e. e. cummings

"Ignore me. I have a touch of existential flu." D.S. Hathaway

"Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing — I suppose that's what a vocation means — at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction." --Robert Lowell

"I hope," he said cautiously, "I never do anything without due thought--even if the thought sometimes has to shift its feet pretty briskly to keep up with the deed." --Brother Cadfael in Ellis Peters' One Corpse Too Many

"The thing about being a writer is that you never have to ask, 'Am I doing something that's worthwhile?' Because even if you fail at it, you know that it's worth doing." --Richard Ford

"Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won't. " --Dorianne Laux

"If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible." --Soren Kierkegaard

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are." --e e cummings

"I was told, 'Thoughts become actions. Actions repeated become habits. Good habits build good character.' " --attributed to Juan Castro, from a Dodgers TV broadcast

"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things." --Winston Churchill

"I'm far from satisfied. I'm far from satisfied. That's why I'm still practicing." --Jazz great Sonny Rollins (on PBS NewsHour)

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." --J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit

"One can do only what one can do. But if someone does that each day he or she can sleep at night and do it again the next day." --Albert Schweitzer

"Impart as much as you can of your spiritual being to those who are on the road with you, and accept as something precious what comes back to you from them." --Albert Schweitzer

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that, because that's what the world needs, people who have come alive." --Howard Thurman

"Those who desire to partake of the pleasure of wit must contribute to its production, since the mind stagnates without external ventilation." --Dr. Johnson

"Loiter in the neighborhood of a problem. After a while a solution strolls by." --Harold Rosenberg

"...it is our good fortune that the exigencies of birth and training furnish all of us with opportunities for snobbery." --Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe in Fer-de-Lance

"To say the same thing, the same way, in different circumstances, is inevitably to mis-speak." --unknown

"A stupid person can make only certain, limited types of errors; the mistakes open to a clever fellow are far broader. But to the one who knows how smart he is compared to everyone else, the possibilities for true idiocy are boundless." --Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos in Iorich

"Knowledge is gained by learning; trust by doubt; skill by practice; and love by love." --Thomas S. Szasz

"It is proven, therefore, that the proof-reader was mistaken, that if he was not mistaken then he was confused, that if he was not confused then he was imagining things, but let him who has never erred, been confused or imagined things, throw the first stone. To err, as the wise man said, is only human, which means that, unless we are wrong to take things literally, anyone who never errs cannot be a real man." --J. Saramago

"Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence." --Thomas S. Szasz

"This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth toward righteousness, not health, but healing, not being, but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified." --Martin Luther

"Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. Do not seek the answers now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions." --R. M. Rilke

Notable Reads

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
The Magicians, Lev Grossman
Sorry Please Thank You, Charles Yu
The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Golem and the Jinni
Alif the Unseen, G. Willow Wilson
Trafalgar, Angelica Gorodischer (transl. Amalia Gladhart)
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/482/the-art-of-poetry-no-83-billy-collins (yep: it's an interview with Billy Collins, poet)
http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/armstrong_04_13.php (Karen Armstrong's review of McCullogh's Silence)
The Art of Fielding (I'm a little ambivalent about adding this here; on balance I think it belongs)
Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music, Glenn Kurtz
Requiem, Itani
The Trumpet of Conscience, Martin Luther King, Jr. (of special note is the final section, "A Christmas Sermon on Peace")
Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin [first notable book of 2013]
Fellow Citizens: The Penguin Book of U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses (reference for recurring presidential readings)
The Drowning Girl, Caitlin R. Kiernan (final notable book read in 2012)
Ordinary Genius, Thomas Fox Averill (very notable)
The Greater Journey, David McCullough
Through the Language Glass, Guy Deutscher
Mr. Putney's Quacking Dog (children's book)
Wild About Books (children's book)
The Elephant's Journey, Jose Saramago
F E G: Ridiculous Poems for Intelligent Children, Hirsch and Ha
1775: Another Part of the Field
Kaddish for Grandpa in Jesus' Name Amen, James Howe
David Copperfield
No Dogs Allowed, Sonia Manzano (children's book)
Working, Studs Terkel
http://www.elimae.com/2012/04/Bene.html
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, Stephen Jay Gould
1Q84, Haruki Murakami (very highly recommended)
The Hobbit; also Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (transl. Tolkien)
Boswell's Life of Johnson (unfinished, but highly notable!)
1776, David McCullough (highly recommended)
Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman
Theology: A Very Brief Introduction
The Infinities, John Banville
Council of Dads
Death with Interruptions
Night Train to Lisbon
Special Topics in Calamity Physics