Category: quotes

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1. Things I have done at work this week (unrelated projects): Researched the difference between a multi-level marketing scheme and a pyramid scheme; used more exclamation points writing one web site than I have in my entire professional career; and learned about the growing mainstream market for total-body cleanses. My job is awesome!

2. Speaking of advertising, let’s watch some Precious Roy Home Shopping Network (from the most brilliant show ever to appear on MTV, Sifl & Olly):

3. And to end the week on a more highbrow note, I came across an Elizabeth Bishop quote that, for me, defines the reason literature exists: “Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it.”

Why I Still Live Here, Despite The Legislature

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“Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands and liked where I came from. I was used to a dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used to horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world. I was used to seeing a long way. I was used to earth colors–tan, rusty red, toned white–and the endless green of Iowa offended me. I was used to a sun that came up over mountains and went down behind other mountains. I missed the color and smell of sagebrush and the sight of bare ground.”

Wallace Stegner, from the essay collection Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. (The title’s from the Big Rock Candy Mountain song!)

"The Grapes Of Wrath" Is One Of The Best Titles Ever

Karen

I took The Grapes of Wrath with me on my trip last week, thinking it would be a good mix of travel and agriculture. (I had forgotten how sad it is, though; I had to stop reading in the Denver airport because I was getting weepy.) Reading it now, right after all my other books about alternative farming and eating locally, and after visiting the family farm that miraculously still struggles on, I’m really struck by how current it is–Steinbeck saw the writing on the wall in 1939:

“…crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money…[until the landowners] were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.”

Literature In The Workplace

Karen 
I'm reading Of Human Bondage and I came across this passage and thought, "Huh, just replace
'painters'with 'art directors' and it's the agency!"


They looked upon him, as painters often do writers, with contempt because he was a layman, with tolerance
because he practised an art, and with awe because he used a medium in which themselves felt ill-at-ease.

Dammit, Spring, Will You Get Spring-like Soon?

Karen1 Comment

This is the rest of the passage from A Moveable Feast I put up a couple weeks ago:

“Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it [spring] back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life…You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the tree and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”

Hear that, spring? You’re making us sad. Shape up.

Good Old J.S.

Karen

With all the cat pictures lately I haven’t mentioned I’ve been on what can only be described as a knitting frenzy–in the last 10 days, I’ve finished legwarmers, a hat, half a mitten, and about seven inches of my vest. Needless to say, my hands were stiff Monday while I was typing at work. But after eight hours of typing about Microsoft I desperately wanted something soothing and intelligent to do. My hands said, “No knitting!” and then I remembered the Goldberg Variations. I remembered how much I love Bach. And I remembered this passage from An Equal Music, which I read in college only once.

This passage ends the book; it’s thought by the narrator as he watches his (married)beloved perform a recital of Bach’s The Art of the Fugue: “Music, such music, is a sufficient gift. Why ask for happiness; why hope not to grieve? It is enough, it is to be blessed enough, to live from day to day and to hear such music–not too much, or the soul could not sustain it–from time to time.”

(By the way, I had copied that passage into an old journal sometime between May 7th and 16th, 2003, when I was moving. And if anyone thinks catching up on reading my blog lately makes them want to “go on antidepressants“–well, try searching through four years of journals to find a passage that asks, “why hope not to grieve?”. That’s all I’m saying.)

The Delights of M.F.K. Fisher

Karen

It’s a thinly-disguised fact that I owe most of what I know to the J. Peterman catalog: If I read about it there, I would usually go and find out more–from British colonialism, Lawrence of Arabia, or Elsa Maxwell to Tolstoy.

And now, 12 years after my first historic Peterman, I’ve discovered M.F.K. Fisher, who was mentioned in a Spring/Summer issue probably around 1996. (Seriously. There was an apron dress you could buy, in pink or blue.) I picked up The Gastronomical Me, and this is what won me over:

Now…the three of us are in some ways even more than twenty-five years older than we were then. And still the warm round peach pie and the cool yellow cream we ate together that August night live in our hearts’ palates, succulent, secret, delicious.

“Hearts’ palates.” Perfect.

Another Salinger Cop-Out

Karen1 Comment

Yes, it’s been busy today, so we can all be glad I keep a record of these passages as I find them. (And yes, that is a James Thurber drawing of a dog. That’s a particularly brilliant detail our old buddy Salinger adds.)

This is from “A Young Girl in 1941 With No Wast At All,” Salinger’s short story originally published in The New Yorker:

She was a beautifully, a perfectly, gray-haired woman in a long sleeved evening gown with Thurber dogs in the pattern. She was wearing a pear-shaped diamond ring and a diamond bracelet. Just on sight no one very sensible would have laid bets on her background. She might, years ago, have walked very erectly across a Broadway stage, with an ostrich fan, singing A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody, or something similarly ostrich fan-ish. She might have been an ambassador’s daughter or a fireman’s daughter. She might have been her husband’s secretary for years. As only second-class beauty can be identified, there was no way of telling.

I Heart Literature

Karen

(Sorry. I had to make that pun.)

I ran across a quote from the Upanishads yesterday which echoed one I found last Chirstmas from Makarios the Great, who was apparently an Egyptian monk. And the drawing’s by Leonardo. Pretty far-ranging blog, I’d say.

The little space within the heart is as great as the vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon and the stars. Fire and lightning and winds are there, and all that now is and all that is not. –The Upanishads

The heart itself is only a small vessel,
yet dragons are there, and lions,
there are poisonous beasts,
and all the treasures of evil,
there are rough and uneven roads,
there are precipices;
but there too is God and the angels,
life is there, and the Kingdom,
there too is light, and there the apostles
and heavenly cities,
and treasures of grace.
All things lie within that little space.
–Makarios the Great