Quote of the day, Aug. 19

Flannery O’Connor, on writing (from Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.”

Quote of the day, Aug. 18

Leo Tolstoy, on change

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”

Quote of the day, Aug. 16

Oscar Wilde, on books

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”

Quote of the day, Aug. 11

Ralph Waldo Emerson, on moving on

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

Quote of the day, Aug. 7

Graham Greene, on writing (from The End of the Affair)

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

 

Quote of the day, Aug. 6

Wendell Berry, on peace

“I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

Quote of the day, Aug. 2

Thomas Mann, from Death in Venice

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”

Quote of the day, July 31

Mark Twain, on the truth

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”

Quote of the day, July 28

Douglas Adams, from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

 

Quote of the day, July 26

Rick Riordan, on the sea

“The sea does not like to be restrained. ”