Category: quotes

This

Karen

Yesterday I decided to be lazy and read a Laurie Colwin novel outside instead of hiking, and I’m glad I did: This is exactly how I feel whenever women talk about eye shadow or waxing or what have you.

Their pinkness, their blondness, their carefully streaked hair, nail polish, eyelash curlers, mascara, the heap of things that lay on the dressing table and that Jane Louise never used made her feel they were women in a way that she was not.

(I’m reading A Big Storm Knocked It Over. Jane Louise is my kind of woman.)

Moon

Karen

It’s a full moon tonight, but it was pretty amazing last night, too. Make sure you see it tonight if you can and think of this quote from Out of Africa:

It was a full moon while I was down at Takaunga, and the beauty of the radiant, still nights was so perfect that the heart bent under it.

And if you want to see what the full moon holds for your inner hippie, you can read about it right here. Just don’t tell Carl Sagan.

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1. RIP, Roger Ebert. I don’t think there was anything he wrote that I didn’t enjoy, and this 2011 essay from Slate is no exception:

I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

2. This has made the rounds but I keep listening to it because the commentary just tickles me: “Shake it off, shake it off.”

 

Today’s Quote

Karen

Today’s super-duper inspirational quote is from The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo:

When in the midst of great change, it is helpful to remember how  a chick is born. From the view of the chick, it is a terrifying struggle. Confined and curled in a dark shell, half-formed, the chick eats all its food and stretches to the contours of its shell. It begins to feel hungry and cramped…

Finally, its own growth begins to crack the shell, and the world as the chick knows it is coming to an end…In that moment—growing but fragile, starving and cramped, its world breaking—the chick must feel like it is dying. Yet once everything it has relied on falls away, the chick is born. It doesn’t die, but falls into the world.

The lesson is profound. Transformations always involves the falling away of things we have relied on, and we are left with a feeling that the world as we know it is coming to an end, because it is…When faced with great change—in self, in relationship, in our sense of calling—we somehow must take in all that has enclosed us, nurtured us, incubated us, so when the new life is upon us, the old is with us.

 

Theology From Children’s Literature

Karen

…complete with Yorkshire dialect. This is from The Secret Garden, my spring book:

“Do you believe in Magic?” asked Colin….”I do hope you do.”

“That I do, lad,” she answered. “I never knowed it by that name but what does th’ name matter? I warrant they call it a different name i’ France an’ a different one i’ Germany. Th’ same thing as set th’ seeds sweelin’ an’ th’ sun sunin’ made thee a well lad an’ it’s th’ Good Thing. It isn’t like us poor fools as think it matters if us is called out of our names. Th’ Big Good Thing doesn’t stop to worrit, bless thee. It goes on makin’ worlds by th’ millions–worlds like us. Never thee stop believin’ in  th’ Big Good Thing an’ knowin’ th’ world’s full of it–an’ call it what tha’ likes.”

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1. I’ve found pretty much the best use of Photoshop outside of True American Dog: LiarTown USA, source of this potential bestseller:

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2. That Radiolab about Beethoven tempi (I have to use the right plural; I was a music major) I posted last week turned me on to Glenn Gould playing Beethoven sonatas. (Here’s all of them in a four-hour chunk; Spotify has them, too.) Glenn’s the man! And this quote is so true:

“Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas
and listen to them for ten years.”

William F. Buckley

Something To Remember

Karen
“Nothing that had happened in the past could be taken away. This was an amazing gift. The past was done and over and settled; you couldn’t get it back, but still, whatever good you had gotten from it, spiritually, emotionally, would be yours for your lifetime.”

Nancy Werlin, Extraordinary

(Found here.)

Thoreau

Karen

“Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.”

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This Is How Books Win Prizes

Karen1 Comment

So if you’re feeling old(er) or trapped or just tapped out, The Hours is probably the worst thing to read. Or maybe it’s the best thing, because you get stuff like this, which will destroy you but then make you want to pick up that gauntlet Michael Cunningham has thrown:

There she is…the old beauty, the old hippie, hair still long and defiantly gray, out on her morning rounds in jeans and a man’s cotton shirt, some sort of ethnic slippers (India? Central America?) on her feet. She still has a certain sexiness; a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm; and yet this morning she makes a tragic sight, standing so straight in her big shirt and exotic shoes, resisting the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to its knees in the tar, taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almost nonchalant, pretending to contemplate the tender young grasses on the far bank when it is beginning to know for certain that it will remain here, trapped and alone, after dark, when the jackals come out.