Quotes about herring
page 88

“And we learn this truth from His sight: That all we taste, in comparison with that which remains out of our reach, Is no more than a single drop of water compared with the whole sea…. We hunger for God’s Infinity, which we cannot devour, And we aspire to His Eternity, which we cannot attain…. In this storm of love, our activity is above reason and is in no wise. Love desires that which is impossible to her; And reason teaches that love is within her rights, but can neither counsel nor persuade her.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

The Sparkling Stone (c. 1340)

Love, Hunger, God, Truth

“The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed steadily into his face.
"They tell me you have been all over the earth," said he, wringing his hands with earnestness. "You must have seen my daughter, for she makes a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she send any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?"
Ethan Brand's eye quailed beneath the old man's. That daughter, from whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

"Ethan Brand" (1850)

World, Soul, Girl, Daughters

“Let it be our endeavour, let it be our task, to keep alight the torch of imperial patriotism, to hold fast the affection and the confidence of our kinsmen across the seas; so that in every vicissitude of fortune the British Empire may present an unbroken front to all her foes, and may carry on even to distant ages the glorious traditions of the British flag.”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech entitled 'The True Conception of Empire' to the Royal Colonial Institute (31 March, 1897).
1890s

Age, Confidence, Distant, Sea

“I saw a woman of thirty-five, living peacefully in the bosom of her family after an interrupted novitiate, show sudden signs of incomprehensible nervous terror, speak of possible 'reprisals', and refuse to go out alone. A very dear friend, took pity on her, offered her shelter. 'Come, child, what have you to fear? You're one of God's little lambs…' 'Harmless? That's all you know! Everybody thinks as you do, and nobody's frightened of me. Well - you can find out for yourself. I had eight men shot, madame…”

Georges Bernanos book Les grands cimetières sous la lune

Source: Les grands cimetieres sous la lune (A Diary of My Times) 1938, p.87-88

Men, God, Fear, Family

“Mrs. Krantz, having dined at Mark's Club, insists that it is exclusive. There would not have been much point to her dining there if she did not think that. A bigger snob than she might point out that the best reason for not dining at Mark’s Club is the chance of finding Mrs Krantz there. It takes only common sense, though, to tell you that on those terms exclusiveness in not just chimerical but plain tedious. You would keep better company eating Kentucky Fried Chicken in a launderette.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

Ibid.
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

Thinking, Sense, Chance

“The daily sight of her is going to be a torment, like God torturing Moses with a glimpse of Zion from the top of Mount Pisgah every single day of his life.”

Michael Chabon (1963) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Source: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), Chapter 9

Life, God

“Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.”

Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet

1910s, My November Guest (1915)

Pleasure, Bird

“Everyone at the Hayholt had seemed obsessed with the empty ritual of power, something Miriamele had lived with for so long that it held no interest for her. It was like watching a confusing game played by bad-tempered children.”

Tad Williams (1957) novelist

Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, To Green Angel Tower (1993), Part 2, Chapter 4, “A Thousand Leaves, A Thousand Shadows” (p. 99).

Children, Game

“Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university? Why is Glenys the first woman in her family in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?Was it because our predecessors were thick? Does anybody really think that they didn't get what we had because they didn't have the talent or the strength or the endurance or the commitment? Of course not. It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand.”

Neil Kinnock (1942) British politician

Speech at the Welsh Labour Party conference, Llandudno (15 May 1987)
This speech was extensively quoted in a Labour Party election broadcast during the 1987 general election. It was also famously used without attribution by U.S. Senator Joe Biden, although Biden had used and properly attributed the speech many times before.

Family, Thinking, Universe

“She fell in love with the cataract and turned to it as a confidant, not because of its beauty or power, but because it seemed to tell her a story which she longed to understand.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Esther Dudley's reaction to Niagara Falls, in Ch. IX
Esther: A Novel (1884)

Love, Beauty, Confidence, Understanding

“A comedy is just a tragedy interrupted, I once said. Do you finish with the kiss or when she opens her eyes to tell him she loves him and sees blonde hairs on his collar?”

Alan Ayckbourn (1939) English playwright

"A Crash Course in Playwriting" (1993) http://education.alanayckbourn.net/EducationInterviewsPlaywriting.htm.

Love, Kiss

“Her complexion seemed slowly to be losing its olive color, and the set of her mouth hardened as though interior shifts were taking place she herself didn't know about but which had already corrected her outlook toward the rest of the world.”

Richard Ford (1944) American novelist and short story writer

Source: A Piece of My Heart (1976), p. 262

World, Color

“That holy, humble, meek, modest, retiring Form, sometimes called the Spirit of Prayer, has been dragged from the closet, and so rudely handled by some of her professed friends, that she has not only lost all her wonted loveliness, but is now stalking the street, in some places, stark mad.”

Asahel Nettleton (1783–1844) American theologian

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 193.

Madness

“If I were running my business, I'd fire Rosie, I mean, I'd look her right in that fat ugly face of hers and say, "Rosie, you're fired."”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

On an interview on why he hates Rosie O'Donnell (28 August 2011)
2010s, 2011

Business

“Generosity, when once she is set forward, knows not how to stop her progress; as her beauty is of that order which grows the more engaging upon nearer acquaintance.”
Nescit enim semel incitata liberalitas stare, cuius pulchritudinem usus ipse commendat.

Pliny the Younger (61–113) Roman writer

Letter 11, 3.
Letters, Book V

Beauty

“Give me a man or a woman with common sense and who is not an idiot and I assure you can make a leader out of him or her.”

Sam Manekshaw (1914–2008) First Field marshal of the Indian Army

During a lecture on leadership quoted in [Field Marshal KM Kariappa Memorial Lectures, 1995-2000, http://books.google.com/books?id=Eux31FCNj8MC&pg=PA21, 2001, Lancer Publishers, 978-81-7062-119-5, 21–]

Sense

“Her audacity turned him on. There was nobody quite so arousing, he decided, as a worthy opponent.”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 11, “War” (p. 298)

“And then a feminist rose to complain about the marginalization of women in liturgy and leadership in the Catholic church today. The speaker collapsed in fear, and answered her by mouthing a litany of cliches about sexual equality and decrying past Church practices for being insufficiently open to the contributions of women to the faith. His cowering was embarrassing.”

Jeffrey Tucker (1963) American writer

Source: Jimmy Carter Excommunicates Himself, archive.lewrockwell.com, 2016-05-22 http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig/tucker6.html,

Women, Fear, Faith, Past

“There are moments when her voice is all he needs.”

Max Frisch book Montauk

Montauk (1975)

“In anguish, I asked the prime minister what our intelligence agencies were doing all these months when the arms build-up was going on. And why action had not been taken to apprehend Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the extremist leader. I asked her if any police officer had been taken to task for negligence of duty in allowing terrorists to smuggle arms into the temple [Golden temple, Amritsar] for almost two years. She had obviously no plausible answer. With a distant look in her eyes, she replied feebly that it was the duty of the Punjab government to take care of these aspects.”

Zail Singh (1916–1994) Indian politician and former President of India

Source: K.R. Sundar Rajan Presidential Years:Zail Singh's posthumous defence of his controversial tenure http://www.outlookindia.com/article/Presidential-Years/202610, Outlook India Magazine, 4 December 1996.

Intelligence, Distant

“Emma's come down.
She's stopped the light
Shining out of her eyes.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Lionheart (1978)

Light

“Perhaps if we had realized they are birds, with all the wonderful characteristics of birds, we would have paid closer attention to the ways in which chickens can enchant us. Take dust-bathing, for example. We call it a bath because the chicken finds a small indentation of dry earth and then proceeds to immerse herself in it as into a warm bath. The earth cleans her feathers. The first time I saw a chicken taking a dust bath, stretching out one iridescent wing and holding it up to the sunshine, then settling into the warmth of the afternoon only to fly effortlessly to a tree to roost in the evening, I was astonished.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Pig Who Sang to the Moon (2003), Ch. 2, p. 59

Way, Bird, Tree, Time

“I'll never have to write my memoirs now after reading this. She had six husbands, at least six lovers - why, my life is so dull compared to hers! I've had one husband, one daughter, one house and no lovers.”

Irene Dunne (1898–1990) American actress

Everyone Loved Irene, by William Frye http://www.irenedunnesite.com/press/vanity-fair-march-2004/ Vanity Fair, 2004]

Life, Lovers, Reading, Housing

“If the clan did not exact punishment for an offense against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled all the others.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 13 (p. 118)

“I met Courtney Love and she said she'd like to sleep with me, but she couldn't cos of my "pop-star thing"… so I said to her I couldn't sleep with her either - cos of her 'ugly thing'…”

Robbie Williams (1974) British singer and entertainer

Interview with Chris Moyles, Radio One (2005)

Love, Star, Sleep

“If we are to live and grow as a university, one of whose paramount tasks is to not only leaders of thought and action but also workers dedicated to the service of the nation, we cannot sit idle with philosophic concern and let things drift as they may. So far as we are concerned, it is for us to set our house in order. It is for us, and specially the younger generation, Hindus, Moslems and Christians alike, to combine and resolutely stand for the permanent well-being of our province and to rescue her from the deadly stagnation which now seems to envelop her.”

Syama Prasad Mookerjee (1901–1953) Indian politician

Speech delivered at Calcutta University Convocation on 2nd March 1935.

Universe, Housing

“Goodbye cold, goodbye rain,
Goodbye sorrow, and goodbye shame.I'm headed out west with my headphones on,
Boarded a flight with a song in the back of my soul
And no one knows
I just found out her ghost left town
The queen of California is stepping down, down.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

Queen of California
Song lyrics, Born and Raised (2012)

Soul

“Once in pre-war days, when curiously-bonneted women drivers were familiar sights at the taxi-wheels, I cried out to one in my dismay: "Is there no speed limit in this mad city?"
"Oh, yes, monsieur," she answered sweetly over her shoulder, "but no one has ever succeeded in reaching it."”

Alexander Woollcott (1887–1943) American critic

"The Paris Taxi-Driver Considered as an Artist," in Enchanted Aisles (1924).

Women, War, Speed, Madness

“Time passed, slipping through the waist of the universe's great hourglass like the eroded soil of this continent slipping down her rivers to the seas.”

Gene Wolfe book The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories

"Seven American Nights", Orbit 20 (1978), ed. Damon Knight, Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009)
Fiction

Universe, Time, Sea

“She has forgotten speech and language and the restlessness of thoughts, has forgotten what is even greater restlessness, this self, has forgotten herself-she, the lost woman, who is now lost in her Savior, who, lost in him, rests at his feet-like a picture. He speaks about her; he says: Her many sins are forgiven her, because she loved much. Although she is present, it is almost as if she were absent; it is almost as if he changed her into a picture, a parable.”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

Three Discourses at Friday Communion November 14, 1849 Hong translation 1997 P. 141
1840s, Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849)

Love, Change

“The doctor asserted, 'Sure religion is a fine influence—got to have it to keep the lower classes in order—fact, it's the only thing that appeals to a lot of these fellows and makes 'em respect the rights of property. And I guess this theology is O. K.; lot of wise old coots figured it out, and they knew more about it than we do.' He believed in the Christian religion, and never thought about it; he believed in the church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol's lack of faith, and wasn't quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she lacked. Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic. When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children to think about; when she experimented with the Wednesday prayer-meeting and listened to store-keeping elders giving unvarying weekly testimony in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as 'washed in the blood of the lamb' and 'a vengeful God…' then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as Zoroastrianism—without the splendor. But when she went to church suppers a felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to her, on an afternoon call, 'My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes you to come into abiding grace,' then Carol found the humanness behind the sanguinary and alien theology.”

Sinclair Lewis book Main Street

Main Street (1920)

God, Children, School, Faith

“I think it’s very cool that we have a black president and that a black child is doing her homework at the desk where Lincoln wrote the emancipation proclamation. I just wish the black president was Condi Rice, or someone who believes more in freedom and the individual and less in an all-knowing government.”

Robert A. Hall (1946) American politician

I'm Tired (February 19, 2009)

Thinking, Freedom

“Whole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians — childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on — suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books.”

Lloyd deMause (1931) American thinker

Source: Foundations of Psychohistory (1982), Ch. 2, ibid.

Books, World, History, Question

“This was her finest role and the hardest one to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity, preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.”

Albert Camus book The Myth of Sisyphus

Source: The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Absurd Creation, p. 83

God, Age, Parting

“When Texas became one of the United States, she entered into an indissoluble relation. All the obligations of perpetual union, and all the guaranties of republican government in the Union, attached at once to the state. The Act which consummated her admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final.”

Salmon P. Chase (1808–1873) Chief Justice of the United States

Texas v. White http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/11/constitution-check-can-texas-get-constitutional-permission-to-leave-the-union/

“The inner work is first of all the work of God's grace in the depth of the soul which subsequently distributes itself among the faculties of the soul, in that of Reason appearing as Belief, in that of Will as Love, and in that of Desire as Hope. When the Divine Light penetrates the soul, it is united with God as light with light. This is the light of faith. Faith bears the soul to heights unreachable by her natural senses and faculties.”

Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) German theologian

Sermon VII : Outward and Inward Morality
Meister Eckhart’s Sermons (1909)

Love, God, Faith, Hope

“Black was this queen as jet, yet on her eyes
Sweet loveliness in black attired lies.”

Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) Italian poet

Bruna e si, ma il bruno il bel non toglie.
Canto XII, stanza 21 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)

“He saw her charming, but he saw not half
The charms her downcast modesty conceal'd.”

James Thomson (poet) The Seasons

Source: The Seasons (1726-1730), Autumn (1730), l. 229.

“The moon makes her circuit of the heaven in twenty-eight days plus about an hour, and with her return to the sign from which she set forth, completes a lunar month.”

Vitruvius book De architectura

Source: De architectura (The Ten Books On Architecture) (~ 15BC), Book IX, Chapter I, Sec. 5

“She never liked the constant presence of her husbands or lovers and did not like, she soon found out, to be alone — a dilemma in one shape or another common to most of mankind.”

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) Novelist, short story writer, literary critic

"Katherine Anne Porter" (p. 302)
American Fictions (1999)

Lovers

“Each person's greatest room for growth is in the areas of his or her greatest strength.”

Marcus Buckingham (1966) British writer

Source: Now, Discover Your Strengths (2001), p. 8

Personality

“Paddy Ashdown: …this is an agreement which the right hon. Lady will be entitled to regard with a certain pride and satisfaction as she looks back on the twilight days of her premiership…”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Third term as Prime Minister

“The rooms were confining, the windows minuscule, the ceilings perilously low. She could not have spent much money on the furnishings, which were shabby, threadbare, nicked, and splintered—I had seen better furniture abandoned at Montreal curbsides.
But if her book-cases were humble, they were bowed under the weight of surprisingly many books—almost as many as there had been in the library of the Duncan and Crowley Estate back in Williams Ford. It seemed to me a treasure more estimable than any fine sofa or plush footstool, and worth all the rough economies surrounding it.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

Source: Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009), pp. 146-147

Money, Books

“When it comes to bullshit, they [advertising agencies] have forgotten what you haven't already learnt about all this crap! (To Rachel - shortly before her firing, when her supposed expertise in advertising results in the failure of the advertising task).”

Alan Sugar (1947) British business magnate, media personality, and political advisor

The Apprentice, Series 1

Failure

“I had seen the princess and let her lie there unawakened, because the happily ever after was so damnably much work.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

"A Sepulchre of Songs," from The Changed Man (April 1992), ISBN 0-812-53365-8, page 125.

Lie, Princess

“But there we are. Some things never do make perfect sense. There must be some explanation, and it is perhaps a little like the Doctrine of the Perfect Partner. We must be content to know that she exists, somewhere in the world, and try not to care overmuch that we will probably never meet her.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 7 (p. 132)

World, Sense, Perfection

“.. your two-year-old could've done that with one thumb in her mouth.”

Paul DiLascia (1959–2008) American software developer

Misc

“Animals cry. At least, they vocalise pain or distress, and perhaps call for help. Most people believe, therefore, that animals can be unhappy and also that they have such feelings as happiness, anger and fear. But there is a tremendous gap between the common sense viewpoint and that of official science on this subject. The ordinary layperson readily believes that his dog, her eat, their parrot or horse, feels. They not only believe it but have constant evidence of it before their eyes. All of us have extraordinary stories of animals we know well. Yet, by dint of rigorous training and great efforts of the mind, most modern scientists — especially those who study the behaviour of animals — have succeeded in becoming almost blind to these matters.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson book When Elephants Weep

Preface, p. 11
When Elephants Weep (1994)

Pain, People, Fear, Dogs

“I guess it was the big plane crash picture [why Warhol started his 'Death'-series], the front page of a newspaper: '129 DIED'. I was also painting the Marilyns [the Marylin Monroe portraits, Warhol started after her tragic death in 1962] I realized that everything I was doing must have been death. It was Christmas or Labor Day - a holiday - and very time that you turned on the radio they said something like '4 millions are going to die'. That started it. But when you see I gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn't really have any effect.”

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) American artist

Source: 1963 - 1967, What Is Pop Art? Interviews with Eight Painters, Part 1 (1963), pp. 116-19

Death, Time, Holiday, Christmas

“A modest young lady with her head the same size as it was when she was a child.”

Jimmy Magee (1935–2017) Gaelic games commentatot

Commenting on Katie Taylor's lack of a big head despite her success. irishtimes.com http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2012/0811/1224321996178.html Olympic Games

“Perhaps this sort of claptrap was good for the Stone Age, when people actually believed that if they prayed for rain they would get it. But we're a grown-up world now, and it's time to put away childish things. But people don't, because most of them don't even know what atheism is. It's not a negation of anything. You don't have to negate what no one can prove exists. No, atheism is a very positive affirmation of man's ability to think for himself, to do for himself, to find answers to his own problems. I'm thrilled to feel that I can rely on myself totally and absolutely; that my children are being brought up so that when they meet a problem they can't cop out by foisting it off on God. Madalyn Murray's going to solve her own problems, and nobody's going to intervene. It's about time the world got up off its knees and looked at itself in the mirror and said: "Well, we are men. Let's start acting like it."”

Madalyn Murray O'Hair (1919–1995) Atheist activist

"Playboy Interview: Madalyn Murray", Playboy (October 1965)

Men, God, Children, People

“I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 35. It just happened—it just came over me. I’d gotten asthma and was having trouble sleeping, getting less than an hour of sleep a night. … I decided I wouldn’t eat meat any more, not even for a million dollars. I felt cleansed and incredible, like the inflammation in my body had been reduced. It was life-changing. … When I decided to become vegetarian, I had to learn how to ‘recook,’ if you will. … When I gave up meat, I wondered what I would make. That turned out to be vegetables, really organic and fresh. I made them very flavorful, using herbs, lemon and a little oil. I think I taught my kids well. My daughter, Dinah, for example, is also a vegetarian and doesn’t eat anything that can look at her.”

Cloris Leachman (1926) American actress

"For Cloris Leachman, No Bad Days" https://parade.com/362906/stephaniestephens/for-cloris-leachman-no-bad-days/, interview with Parade magazine (2 January 2015).

Life, Thinking, Sleep, Learning

“For Michele Bachmann to use ideology as a reason not to support equal opportunity and protections for all citizens shows she is losing touch with her district … With cuts in local government aid on top of tough economic times, it makes sense to support measures to keep our communities safe.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

2009-10-09
Reed Campaign Blasts Michele Bachmann for Not Supporting Our Troops and Military Retirees
Brian
Falldin
MN Progressive Project
http://www.mnprogressiveproject.com/diary/4200/reed-campaign-blasts-michele-bachmann-for-not-supporting-our-troops-and-military-retirees
About

Communication, Support, Sense, Time

“Her story was a creation myth, a legend already more than twenty thousand years old. Such tales—which said that Jahna’s people were the pinnacle of creation, that theirs was the only right way, and that all others were less than human—taught the people to care passionately about themselves, their kin, and a few treasured ideals.
But to the exclusion of all other humans, let alone such non-people as the Old Man’s kind.”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 13 “Last Contact” section III (p. 432)

People, Way, Passion

“How shocking must thy summons be, O Death!
To him that is at ease in his possessions!
Who, counting on long years of pleasure here,
Is quite unfurnished for the world to come.
In that dread moment, how the frantic soul
Raves round the walls of her clay tenement;
Runs to each avenue, and shrieks for help;
But shrieks in vain.”

Hugh Blair (1718–1800) British philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 175.

Death, Pleasure, World, Soul

“We are in great hopes about poor Lydia.- An honest and ingenious motherly woman in our neighbourhood has undertaken the perfect cure of her, and we have every reason to think, with God's blessing, she will succeed- which is a blessing we shall owe entirely to the comfort of being poor, for had we been rich, the doctors would have had the honor of killing her a twelvemonth ago.”

Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) British composer, writer and grocer

(from vol 1, letter 28: 4 Oct 1775, to Miss L___ ) [sadly, little Lydia Sancho died in 1776]

God, Hope, Thinking, Perfection

“Long distance information, give me Memphis Tennessee
Help me find the party trying to get in touch with me
She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call
'Cause my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall”

Chuck Berry (1926–2017) American rock-and-roll musician

"Memphis, Tennessee" (1959)( aka "Memphis")
Song lyrics

Help

“I'd like to thank the academy and I'd like to thank my mother and I'd like to thank my mother again, because I forgot to thank her last year.”

James Spader (1960) American actor

2005 Emmy Awards acceptance speech for Best dramatic actor. Quoted at BBC News (September 19, 2005)

“A woman telling her true age is like a buyer confiding his final price to an Armenian rug dealer.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Women & men

Age, Confidence

“I feel I'm happily inspired now on Classical soil:
The Past and Present speak louder, more charmingly.
Here, as advised, I leaf through the works of the Ancients
With busy hands, and, each day, with fresh delight.
But at night Love keeps me busy another way:
I become half a scholar but twice as contented.
And am I not learning, studying the shape
Of her lovely breasts: her hips guiding my hand?”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe book Roman Elegies

Elegy 5
Roman Elegies (1789)

Love, Way, Feeling, Business

“Some asked how pearls did grow, and where?
Then spoke I to my girl
To part her lips, and showed them there
The quarelets of pearl.”

Robert Herrick book Hesperides

"The Rock of Rubies, and the Quarrie of Pearls".
Hesperides (1648)

Girl, Parting

“I had the greatest pleasure of listening to Gloria Estefan's lecture on "Life, Art and Spirituality" at the Graham Center of Florida International University today. It was a great experieince. She is such a wonderful, amazing woman, and a great inspiration. I believe that everyone who attended her lecture today was blown away by her sincerity, kind words and her sense of humor... yes, because even in the darkest days of her life, there was a little room for humor. She spoke of the power of prayer, and how different this world would be if we were to stop the violence, and the hating, and the wars between us.”

Gloria Estefan (1957) Cuban-American singer-songwriter, actress and divorciada

comment from audience member at Esteran's address at Florida International University (November 14, 2006)
2007, 2008

Life, Hate, War, Pleasure

“Once a woman has given you her heart you can never get rid of the rest of her.”

John Vanbrugh The Relapse

The Relapse, Act II, sc. i (1697)

Heart

“She divorced her husband, y' know. I never knew him, it was before I met Jane. Apparently she came back from work one mornin' an' found her husband in bed with the milkman. With the milkman, honest to God. Well, apparently, from that day forward Jane was a feminist. An' I've noticed, she never takes milk in her tea.”

Willy Russell Shirley Valentine

Shirley, page 13.
Shirley Valentine (1986)

God, Tea

“Let it not be said, wherever there is energy or creative genius, 'She has a masculine mind.'
This by no means argues a willing want of generosity toward Woman. Man is as generous towards her as he knows how to be. Wherever she has herself arisen in national or private history, and nobly shone forth in any form of excellence, men have received her, not only willingly, but with triumph.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Men, History

“Why did she have to wake up this morning? Or ever! But especially this morning. Her stare took on a glint of panic. Then she thought: Oh! This is my wedding day!”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 342

Wedding

“Freud says, “Man fears that his strength will be taken from him by woman, dreads becoming infected with her femininity and then proving himself a weakling.” Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 27

Fear, Boy, Nature, Fight

“We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

The War and Russian Social-Democracy (September 1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s
Context: Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i. e., ninth-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness. To us it is most painful to see and feel the outrages, the oppression an the humiliation our fair country suffers at the hands of the tsar's butchers, the nobles and the capitalists.

Love, Country

“Arts may ply fantastic anatomy but nature is always herself in her wildest moods of extravagence.”

John Clare (1793–1864) English poet

'Essay on Landscape'
Other

Art, Mood, Nature

“She walks—the lady of my delight—
A shepherdess of sheep.
Her flocks are thoughts. She keeps them white;
She keeps them from the steep”

Alice Meynell (1847–1922) English publisher, editor, writer, poet, activist

Opening stanza of "The Shepherdess" https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-shepherdess/ in Later Poems (London: John Lane, 1902).

“Trouble me not; such an idol is accursed, and therefore I will not touch it.' The patron and the arguesyn (i. e. sergeant who commanded the forcats) with two officers, having the chief charge of all such matters, said, 'Thou shalt handle it,' and so they violently thrust it to his face, and put it betwixt his hands, who seeing the extremity, taking the idol and advisedly looking about, he cast it into the river, and said, 'Let our lady now save herself; she is light enough; let her learn to swim.”

John Knox (1514–1572) Scottish clergyman, writer and historian

After that was no Scotchman urged with that idolatry. John Knox letter December 1559 as quoted in John Knox https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=S94QAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-S94QAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1 by William Mackergo Taylor, 1885, p.25-26

Light, Learning

“He knew what she'd be reading first as she started from the beginning, reading what he'd had to say when he was younger, and then growing older, stories at first about tiny mice who lived in families in back of the wall, and stories about school, and apartments in Greenpoint and Carnasie and Flatbush, elves in Ireland that he'd pictured as Pop had told him about them, and the woman with lace on her sleeves.
She kept turning pages, and then halfway through, she whispered, "Water Street."
Thomas knew she was reading now about a boy who listened at a register, thinking about a family, and a lighthouse, and then she turned the next page and took a breath.
It was the story he really wanted her to see: a story about a girl who though less of herself than everyone else did, who worried about everyone, even when she didn't want to, even when it made her irritable. A girl who was afraid, and who hardly knew it yet, but was on her way to being a healer like her mother, because there'd never be anything else for her, and how lucky they were just to know her.”

Patricia Reilly Giff (1935) American children's writer

Source: Water Street (2006), Chapters 21-29, p. 135-136

School, Family, Way, Girl

“Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!”

Claude McKay (1889–1948) Jamaican American writer, poet

America, l. 1-4

Love, Life, Youth, Hell

“The moon is not kept in her orbit round the earth, nor the earth in her orbit round the sun, by a force that varies merely in the inverse ratio of the squares of the distances.”

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) British political economist

Source: An Essay on The Principle of Population (First Edition 1798, unrevised), Chapter XIII, paragraph 2, lines 19-22

Sun

“No sound doth great the still of night;
My mother land in silence lies;
Yet oft is heard an anguished moan
As Georgia in her slumber sighs. I stand alone … the mountains, shades
The slumber of my land caress.
O God! O God! when will we wake
And rise again to happiness?”

Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907) Georgian poet and politician; a saint of Georgian Orthodox Church

Elegy, p. 60
Anthology of Georgian Poetry (1948)

God, Mountain, Silence, Night

“It is a view of God that compensates every thing else, and enables the soul to rest in His bosom. How, when the child in the night screams with terror, hearing sounds that it knows not of, is that child comforted and put to rest? Is it by a philosophical explanation that the sounds were made by the rats in the partition? Is it by imparting entomological knowledge? No; it is by the mother taking the child in her lap, and singing sweetly to it, and rocking it. And the child thinks nothing of the explanation, but only of the mother.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 599

God, Soul, Knowledge, Thinking

“If books were sold as software and online recordings are, they would have this legalese up front:
The content of this book is distributed on an 'as is' basis, without warranty as to accuracy of content, quality of writing, punctuation, usefulness of the ideas presented, merchantability, correctness or readability of formulae, charts, and figures, or correspondence of (a) the table of contents with the actual contents, (2) page references in the index (if any) with the actual page numbering (if present), and (iii) any illustration with its adjacent caption. Illustrations may have been printed reversed or inverted, the publisher accepts no responsibility for orientation or chirality. Any resemblance of the author or his or her likeness or name to any person, living or dead, or their heirs or assigns, is coincidental; all references to people, places, or events have been or should have been fictionalized and may or may not have any factual basis, even if reported as factual. Similarities to existing works of art, literature, song, or television or movie scripts is pure happenstance. References have been chosen at random from our own catalog. Neither the author(s) nor the publisher shall have any liability whatever to any person, corporation, animal whether feral or domesticated, or other corporeal or incorporeal entity with respect to any loss, damage, misunderstanding, or death from choking with laughter or apoplexy at or due to, respectively, the contents; that is caused or is alleged to be caused by any party, whether directly or indirectly due to the information or lack of information that may or may not be found in this alleged work. No representation is made as to the correctness of the ISBN or date of publication as our typist isn't good with numbers and errors of spelling and usage are attributable solely to bugs in the spelling and grammar checker in Microsoft Word. If sold without a cover, this book will be thinner than those sold with a cover. You do not own this book, but have acquired only a revocable non-exclusive license to read the material contained herein. You may not read it aloud to any third party. This disclaimer is a copyrighted work of Jef Raskin, first published in 2004, and is distributed 'as is', without warranty as to quality of humor, incisiveness of commentary, sharpness of taunt, or aptness of jibe.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

"If Books Were Sold as Software" http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&dateissued=20040818#11200, NewsScan.com (18 August 2004) If Books Were Sold as Software (2004)

Death, People, Books, Art

“… the huge church […] was thundering its gospel under her eyes.To have Niagara for a rival is no joke. Hazard spoke with no such authority; and Esther's next idea was one of wonder how, after listening here, any preacher could have the confidence to preach again. "What do they know about it?" she asked herself. "Which of them can tell a story like this, or a millionth part of it?"”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

Source: Esther: A Novel (1884), Ch. IX

Confidence, Idea, Parting

“Dr. Wadewitz wrote and edited extensively on Wikipedia during the final 10 years of her life, contributing 36 featured articles and more than 49,000 edits.”

Adrianne Wadewitz (1977–2014) academic and Wikipedian

"Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz - Obituary" http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/fortwayne/obituary.aspx?n=adrianne-wadewitz&pid=170755315. Legacy.com (Fort Wayne, Indiana: Published in Fort Wayne Newspapers on Apr. 23, 2014). April 23, 2014. About

Life

“Just as the mother influence is formative with a man's anima, the father has a determining influence on the animus of a daughter. The father imbues his daughter's mind with the specific coloring conferred by those indisputable views mentioned above, which in reality are so often missing in the daughter. For this reason the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life and full of wishes and judgments about how things "ought to be," prevents all contact with life. The animus appears in many myths, not only as death, but also as a bandit and murderer, for example, as the knight Bluebeard, who murdered all his wives.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche (1994), The Animus, a Woman's Inner Man, p. 319 - 320

Love, Life, Death, God

“Serious drinkers are like serious eaters or serious noneaters. They are like serious drug-addicts. Their addiction holds a spell over them which acts as some powerful secret at the center of everything they do. The serious eater listens to others talking of diets, Weight Watchers, exercises; she hears them excitedly comparing pounds lost, pounds gained. She hears them encouraging each other, joking, consoling. She is not one of them. She knows the diets better than they do; she knows Weight Watchers is useless for her; she knows her life is on some Almighty Scale that she has to step on alone. She is in some covenant with food — a covenant which she probably does not understand, but which nevertheless exerts some magical, compelling power over her. She hates it; she loves it; she keeps her covenant silent.”

Marion Woodman (1928–2018) Canadian writer

Source: Addiction to Perfection (1982), p. 11

Love, Life, Hate, Secret

“In every premenstrual woman struggling to govern her temper, sky-cult wars again with earth-cult.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 12

War

“The cult of the Virgin, Mariolatry, which by the gradual elevation of the divine element in the Virgin has led almost to her deification, answers merely to the feeling that God should be a perfect man, that God should include in his nature the feminine element. The progressive exaltation of the Virgin Mary, the work of Catholic piety, having its beginning in the expression Mother of God, …has culminated in attributing to her the status of co-redeemer and in the dogmatic declaration of her conception without the stain of original sin. Hence she now occupies a position between Humanity and Divinity and nearer Divinity than Humanity. And it has been surmised that in course of time she may perhaps even come to be regarded as yet another personal manifestation of the Godhead.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

God, Feeling, Nature, Time

“A while she stood
Transformed by grief to marble, and appeared
Her own pale monument; but when she breathed
The secret anguish of her wounded soul,
So moving were the plaints! they would have soothed
The stooping falcon to suspend his flight,
And spare his morning prey.”

Elijah Fenton (1683–1730) British poet

Act III, Scene I, p. 25
Mariamne: A Tragedy (1723)

Secret, Soul, Appearance

“I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch … and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order … by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.”

Karen Blixen book Seven Gothic Tales

"The Old Chevalier"
Seven Gothic Tales (1934)

Life, Women, World, Girl

“Far from New England's blustering shore,
New England's worm her hulk shall bore,
And sink her in the Indian seas,
Twine, wine, and hides, and China teas.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

Monday, Though All the Fates Should Prove Unkind, st. 2 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Monday

Wine, Tea, Sea

“She had in all her life never stopped talking long enough to given anyone time to approach her with any proposition regarding sexual irregularity; and the general tendency to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted was present in her in a specially rank form.”

Rebecca West (1892–1983) British feminist and author

Source: The Thinking Reed (1936), Chapter IX

Life, Time

““It must be a real one-horse town.”
Auger shook her head as she lit a cigarette. “It has wild ambitions of becoming a one-horse town.””

Alastair Reynolds book Century Rain

Source: Century Rain (2004), Chapter 15 (p. 242)

Horse

“What is the deep background on the deep male? From 100,000 BC until, let's say, 1792 — Mary Wollstonecraft and her Vindication of the Rights of Women — there was simply the man, whose main characteristics was that he got away with everything. From 1792 until about 1970, there was, in theory anyway, the "enlightened" man, who, while continuing to get away with everything, agreed to meet women to talk about talks which would lead to political concessions. Post-1970, the enlightened man became the new man, who isn't interested in getting away with anything, who believes, indeed, that the female is not merely equal to the male but is his plain superior.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

Women

“Picture postcards never show the bugs,” I told her. “Stinging ants, wasps, fleas, roaches the size of your hand. Postcards never show the heat.”

Pat Murphy book The Falling Woman

Source: The Falling Woman (1986), Chapter 1 (p. 13)

“What he thought of her she knew, what he was capable of saying to her she had felt; yet they were married, for all that, and marriage meant that a woman should cleave to the man with whom, uttering tremendous vows, she had stood at the altar.”

Henry James book The Portrait of a Lady

Source: The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Ch. LI

Marriage

“The one great poem of New England is her Sunday.”

Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist

Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit (1887)

“I'm weary of conjectures,—this must end 'em.
Thus am I doubly armed: my death and life,
My bane and antidote, are both before me:
This in a moment brings me to an end;
But this informs me I shall never die.
The soul, secured in her existence, smiles
At the drawn dagger, and defies its point.
The stars shall fade away, the sun himself
Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years;
But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.”

Joseph Addison book Cato

Act V, scene i.
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

Life, Death, War, Youth

“Steve Jobs set Carly Fiorina up over a decade ago. He used compliments and empty promises to make sure HP never brought to market an iPod competitor and, while it isn't certain that HP would have been successful, had it been, Apple likely wouldn't be around today, and Fiorina lost her job partially as a result of that scam.”

Rob Enderle (1954) American financial analyst

Free Anti-Phishing Training from Sacha Baron Cohen http://itbusinessedge.com/blogs/unfiltered-opinion/free-anti-phishing-training-from-sacha-baron-cohen.html in IT Business Edge (17 July 2018)

Success