Monthly Archives: August, 2016
To arrest motion
“The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” — William Faulkner I could really identify with this quote, because even without being an artist, I’m always …
The day will arrive
“It’s quiet. It’s early. My coffee is hot…In a few moments the day will arrive…For the next twelve hours I will be exposed to the day’s demands. It is now that I must make a choice.” – Max Lucado Many years ago my friend Gloria, who has been a psychotherapist for more than 40 years, told …
A friend knows
“A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.” — Donna Roberts In April, during the weeks Jeff was recovering from the surgery to remove his brain tumor, we were unable to travel to our York home. I started to worry about various things I needed to take …
The quickening pollen
“Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.” ― James Russell Lowell If you suffer from seasonal allergies, the term “quickening pollen” might not sound like a good thing. But in the sense that Lowell intended it, the concept is quite exciting. Suppose you could somehow time travel to have …
In these fraught times
“In these fraught times, our rhetoric must be toned down, our words more carefully weighed, even while we expose and correct the evils of the day. We cannot allow divisiveness and anger to replace e pluribus unum as America’s national theme.” — Mortimer Zuckerman Zuckerman’s words sound as if he was writing yesterday, don’t they? …
A wise passage
“Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?” — Philip Gilbert Hamerton I never thought about it, but perhaps Hamerton is right. For one thing, it’s easier to notice a quote when it is set apart from the …
An obscure comfort
“It comforted her, in the confused unhappy welter of her emotions, to see the mountains always tranquil, remote, in their lonely splendour; untouchable, serenely inviolate. It was an obscure comfort to her to know that man’s hectic world wasn’t the only one — that there were others, where agitation and passion and bewilderment had no …
The patient seamstress
“Faith is the patient seamstress who mends our torn belief, who sews the hem of childhood trust and clips the threads of grief.” — Joan Walsh Anglund I think this poem captures the essence of how faith operates in most lives. Some claim to have had …
Geniuses
“A certain group of geniuses can easily learn even the world’s most difficult languages: they’re called babies.” — Ashleigh Brilliant Are you bilingual, or (even more impressive) do you speak several languages fluently? If so, I envy you. I’ve always wished that I could communicate in many different languages. I suppose it’s because I like to …
Defeat Despair 