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John Crowley's LJ (RSS Feed)
03-15-2008, 06:57 AM
Here are some furhter pages out of my 1975 copybook (which is not a diary but only a record of bits out of reading, formerly wise sententiae and maxims and moral sayings, but in my case mostly oddities.

No rains shall fresh the flats of sea
Nor close the clay-field's sharded shores
And every heart think loathingly
Its dearest turned to bores..
G.M. Hopkins, A Summer Malison

But the Rabbi answered, "I am going to get so many whips in Gehenna that a few more won't matter. Why are they so afraid of Gehenna? Since the ALmighty created it, it must be Paradise in disguise.
Isaac Bashevis Singer

...a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you followed the parables, you would yourself become parables, and with thath rid of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately, only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality; in parable you have lost.
Franz Kafka

Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.
Malebranche

Narcissus leaned over the spring, enthralled by the only man in whose eyes he had ever dared or been given the chance to forget himself.
Dag Hammarskjold

This elaborate ceremony [Egyptian mummification of cats] was not an exception but the rule. In the latter nineteenth century some 300,000 cat mummies were uncovered at Beni Hassan and shipped to Liverpool, England -- where the cargo was sold to farmers, who used it as fertilizer.
Anthony S. Mercati, The Zoo of the Gods

If, after the manner of men, I have struggled with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?
St. Paul

It is idle to encourage oneself in metaphysical distresses.
Samuel Johnson

It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its cover, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the the hope that I may some day read them, which sometimes develops into the belief that I have read them.
Kenneth Clark

For the heart is, in a sense, like the Prince of Wales; we would not have it cut in stone, but how pathetic it is when, as at Wembley, we see it modelled in butter.
John Collier, His Monkey Wife [A statue of the Prince of Wales in Canadian butter was shown at the Empire Exhibition in Wembley in the 1920s]

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and delighted; for we expected to see an author, and we find a man. Whereas those who have good taste, and who see a book expecting to find only a man, are quite surprised to find an author.
Pascal

If we had keen vision and feeling of ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
George Eliot, Middlemarch




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