A typo is like a mental pothole. It’s a jolt of wrongness — and it reminds me that I’m reading. The most sublime moments for me come when I’m so enraptured by the story that I’m not thinking of it as a book any more. I’m THERE . . . and then a tiepo comes along and knoks me bak to realitee.
And I HATE relaitee.
Quotations from all quarters on life, literature, and whatever else tickled my fancy. Browse and enjoy. —T. S.
JD Rhoades on tyops
7 August 2012 by Leave a Comment
G. K. C. on characters in Romance
5 August 2012 by Leave a Comment
In every pure romance there are three living and moving characters. For the sake of argument they may be called St. George and the Dragon and the Princess. In every romance there must be the twin elements of loving and fighting. In every romance there must be the three characters: there must be the Princess, who is a thing to be loved; there must be the Dragon, who is a thing to be fought; and there must be St. George, who is a thing that both loves and fights.
There have been many symptoms of cynicism and decay in our modern civilization. But of all the signs of modern feebleness, of lack of grasp on morals as they actually must be, there has been none quite so silly or so dangerous as this: that the philosophers of today have started to divide loving from fighting and to put them into opposite camps. [But] the two things imply each other; they implied each other in the old romance and in the old religion, which were the two permanent things of humanity. You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it. You cannot fight without something to fight for. To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all; it is lust. It may be an airy, philosophical, and disinterested lust; it may be, so to speak, a virgin lust; but it is lust, because it is wholly self-indulgent and invites no attack. On the other hand, fighting for a thing without loving it is not even fighting; it can only be called a kind of horse-play that is occasionally fatal.
Wherever human nature is human and unspoilt by any special sophistry, there exists this natural kinship between war and wooing, and that natural kinship is called romance. It comes upon a man especially in the great hour of youth; and every man who has ever been young at all has felt, if only for a moment, this ultimate and poetic paradox. He knows that loving the world is the same thing as fighting the world.
[Paragraph breaks added. —T. S.]
Jonah Goldberg on the limits of compromise
30 July 2012 by Leave a Comment
If I say we need one hundred feet of bridge to cross a one-hundred-foot chasm that makes me an extremist. Somebody else says we don’t need to build a bridge at all because we don’t need to cross the chasm in the first place. That makes him an extremist. The third guy is the centrist because he insists that we compromise by building a fifty-foot bridge that ends in the middle of thin air? As an extremist I’ll tell you that the other extremist has a much better grasp on reality than the centrist does. The extremists have a serious disagreement about what to do. The independent who wants to split the difference has no idea what to do and doesn’t want to bother with figuring it out.
—Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Clichés
G. K. C. on words
26 July 2012 by Leave a Comment
Why shouldn’t we quarrel about a word? What is the good of words if they aren’t important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn’t any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn’t there be a quarrel about a word? If you’re not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about?
—G. K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross
Solzhenitsyn on evil
22 July 2012 by Leave a Comment
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Anthony Horowitz on proofreading
19 July 2012 by Leave a Comment
Meanwhile, across the river, I have my adult publisher, Orion – and they also have problems with me. Relations between us have been strained ever since they published my Sherlock Holmes novel, The Mouse of Slick, with no fewer than 35 proof-reading errors. Their proof-reader tried to kill herself. She shot herself with a gnu.
—Anthony Horowitz, ‘Do We Still Need Publishers?’
(For those not in on the joke, Mr. Horowitz’s Sherlock Holmes novel is actually called The House of Silk. We think. Unless it really is The Mouse of Slick, and Orion misspelt it on the cover.)
J. R. R. T. on the banality of evil
17 July 2012 by Leave a Comment
A small knowledge of human history depresses one with the sense of the everlasting mass and weight of human iniquity: old, old, dreary, endless repetitive unchanging incurable wickedness. All towns, all villages, all habitations of men — sinks! And at the same time one knows there is always good: much more hidden, much less clearly discerned, seldom breaking out into recognizable, visible, beauties of word or deed or face — not even when in fact sanctity, far greater than the visible advertised wickedness, is really there. But I fear that in the individual lives of all but a few, the balance is debit — we do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil. It must be terrible to be a priest!
—J. R. R. Tolkien, Letters no. 69
Isak Dinesen on cures
15 July 2012 by Leave a Comment
The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.
—Isak Dinesen
Terry Pratchett on success
7 July 2012 by Leave a Comment
The secret to success is to be yourself as hard as you can.
—Terry Pratchett
Isaac Asimov on self-assessment
28 June 2012 by Leave a Comment
As reported in Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s combox:
Dear Dr. Asimov,
When do you know that a story is good enough to be published?
—Edward Willett
Dear Mr. Willett:
When it is published.
—Isaac Asimov
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