Aha!
And then a new light, less dazzling, no doubt, than that other illumination which had made me perceive that the work of art was the sole means of rediscovering Lost Time, shone suddenly within me. …
Today’s One-Liner (#193)
Great novels always spring from an obsession that has been transcended. –René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure
Naming
We named our firstborn after Maximilian Kolbe, because naming one’s children after saints is what Roman Catholics do. We believe doing so wins the newborn the patronage of the saint in heaven. But there was…
Today’s One-Liner (#192)
The great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realize that after all, we [moderns] might have been mistaken. –C.F.J. Martin, quoted in Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the…
What Makes Man Human: An Easy Essay by Peter Maurin
1. To give and not to takethat is what makes man human. 2. To serve and not to rulethat is what makes man human. 3. To help and not to crushthat is what makes man…
Today’s One-Liner (#191)
She loved [composer Richard] Wagner, which was something very difficult to understand. –Joe Zarella on Dorothy Day, in Rosalie G. Riegle, ed., Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her
Minute Particulars
His father and mother had walked where he would walk as a young man, drifter and dreamer, who would in his fiction delineate each footstep, each bird call, each oval of sand wet or dry,…
Today’s One-Liner (#190)
The Irish were born for leaving, otherwise the rest of the world would have no pubs. –Auntie Violet, in Kenneth Branagh’s film, Belfast
Stay with Christ
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous dictum that he would stay with Christ even if he were proven scientifically wrong suggests no more and no less than a belief in the primacy of moral values over theoretical knowledge….
Today’s One-Liner (#189)
Jokes could be fatal in the Soviet Union. –Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter