Tagged: quotes

Classics

Books and Reading

Humiliation through Rereading

This quote by Joseph Epstein rings true with me: Rereading can be…a humility-inducing activity, when, on rereading, one learns that the first time around with a book, one’s politics or fantasies or personal anxieties were in fact doing most of the work. Rereading books first read when young, one is inclined to weep for the naif one not so long ago was. And while at it one discovers, if one gets to reread the same book twenty years hence, one is even one now. I can think of...

Henry Fielding

Books and Reading

What Is Reading For?

I saw this comment on a post in someone else’s blog the other day: My theory is, at least they’re reading. Who cares what they read? Just read, damn it. If the discussion were about kids who were just learning to read, I’d be inclined to agree–there is a point in everyone’s life when the best way to improve as a reader is to read as much as you can, regardless of the content (mostly–I hate Captain Underpants!). But the blog post was about reading in general, and...

Deacons and Diaconate / Spirituality

A Grief Observed

About ten days ago I wrote about a former student who had been ordained a deacon. Yesterday I saw him again, but the circumstance were far from joyful. He was the assisting deacon at a funeral mass I attended. The funeral was for my friend’s husband, who passed away at the age of 49 from cancer. He found out he had cancer about ten months ago, shortly after he found out they were expecting their third child. Their daughter was born a few weeks before he died. C.S....

Road in the Mist

Prayer / Spirituality

A Prayer by Thomas Merton

One of my favorite spiritual writers is Thomas Merton, and one of my favorite prayers comes from his book Thoughts in Solitude: My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in...

Herodotus

Books and Reading

Feeling Stressed Today? Take Some Advice from Herodotus

“People with bows string them when they need to use them and unstring them when they’ve finished with them. If they kept them strung all the time, the bows would break, and then they wouldn’t be able to use them when they needed them. It is no different with people’s temperments. Anyone who is serious all the time and never allows himself a fair measure of relaxation will imperceptibly slide into madness or have a stroke.” –Amasis, king of Egypt, in Herodotus’ The Histories

Don Quixote translated by Edith Grossman

Books and Reading

Sancho Panza on Death

I’ve been listening to George Guidall reading Don Quixote, and the other day I was struck by this description of death by Sancho Panza: “By my faith, Señor,” responded Sancho, “you mustn’t trust in the fleshless woman, I mean Death, who devours lamb as well as mutton; I’ve heard our priest say that she tramples the high towers of kings as well as the humble huts of the poor. This lady is more powerful than finicky; nothing disgusts her, she eats everything, and she does everything, and she...

Book on the Bookshelf Petroski

Books and Reading

The Book on the Bookshelf Reading Update

I’ve had very little time to read lately, but I have been able to snatch a few pages here and there of Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf. Here are a few interesting things I’ve learned so far: Early writers did not put spaces in between their words. Word separation became common only after printing was invented. I knew that the word Bible came from the Greek word for book, biblion, but I did not know that biblion came from byblos, from the Phoenician city that was...

Tristram Shandy

Books and Reading

Tristram Shandy the First Blogger?

Today in 1760 the first two volumes of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy were published. I read it three years ago and remember smiling through much of it. Here are the notes I wrote to myself at the time I finished it: What a pleasant book. Tristram Shandy takes its own sweet time to be told, really goes nowhere, but manages to be engaging in spite of itself. I love the narrator’s personality and the wonderful depictions of Uncle Toby and Trim. Sterne reminds me somewhat...

Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse

Books and Reading / Catholic Education / Poetry / Teaching

The Best Thing I Read Today

The best thing I read today was “The Lady of Shalott” with my eighth grade literature class. One of my favorite stanzas: She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces through the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look’d down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack’d from side to side; “The curse is come upon me,” cried The Lady of Shalott.