Posts Tagged Quotes

Flu season has come again to the North Country and I was laid up most of a week. Writing was impossible… reading nearly so. I took the time to catch up on a few favorite blogs and to watch a couple of old westerns based on novels: Hondo and Hombre. It would be a fair summation to say that both The Duke and Paul Newman have much better movies to their credit.

MontanaWriter has been on a hold pattern of late. I read, I think, I wait.

I read Shelley and Berry and Richard Hugo and Dennis O’Driscoll… and Thoreau.

Here are a few small quotes.

Enjoy!

 

Some Small Quotes from Thoreau

 

The best poetry has never been written, for when it might have been, the poet forgot it, and when it was too late remembered it; or when it might have been, the poet remembered it, and when it was too late forgot it.

“What are you doing now?” he asked. “Do you keep a journal?” So I make my first entry to-day.

 

Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another.

 

We should not endeavor coolly to analyze our thoughts, but, keeping the pen even and parallel with the current, make an accurate transcript of them. Impulse is, after all, the best linguist,

 

Virtue and Truth go undefended, and Falsehood and Affectation are thrown in my teeth,

 

The poem is drawn out from under the feet of the poet, his whole weight has rested on this ground.

I am the wiser in respect to all knowledges, and the better qualified for all fortunes, for knowing that there is a minnow in the brook.

A very meagre natural history suffices to make me a child.

 

The most positive life that history notices has been a constant retiring out of life, a wiping one’s hands of it, seeing how mean it is, and having nothing to do with it.

What a man knows, that he does.

Say, Not so, and you will outcircle the philosophers.

We are constantly invited to be what we are; as to something worthy and noble.

 

Let the daily tide leave some deposit on these pages, as it leaves sand and shells on the shore. So much increase of terra firma. This may be a calendar of the ebbs and flows of the soul; and on these sheets as a beach, the waves may cast up pearls and seaweed.

Men see God in the ripple but not in miles of still water.

 

I should wither and dry up if it were not for lakes and rivers. I am conscious that my body derives its genesis from their waters

Water seems a middle element between earth and air. The most fluid in which man can float. Across the surface of every lake there sweeps a hushed music.

I stopped short in the path today to admire how the trees grow up without forethought regardless of the time and circumstances. They do not wait as men do— now is the golden age of the sapling— Earth, air, sun, and rain, are occasion enough—.

Though I should front an object for a lifetime I should only see what it concerned me to see.

 

A wave of happiness flows over us like sunshine over a field.

 

 

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Henry David Thoreau

I have been reading Thoreau again of late. Not Walden, but excerpts from his Journals and a few lesser-known works like Canoeing in the Wilderness.

Down the road perhaps, I may review one or two of these works here at MontanaWriter. But I will not promise anything. A restless spirit makes it difficult for me to stop long enough to review something I have already finished.

As an American writer, I read Thoreau (and Whitman and Emerson and Twain) for the same reason that a Spanish writer would read Cervantes or an English writer would read Shakespeare and Milton and Johnson. It is about literary roots.

I used to think that it was Whitman who was the first “American” writer. But reading now Thoreau’s journals I think maybe I have been wrong. Emerson, who could only have come from America, has too much of the Old World or the Continental in him. Thoreau has none of it. He is all New World and wilderness.

Maybe it would be most accurate to say: Whitman was the first “American” poet and Thoreau the first “American” writer.

Reading Thoreau is like spending time in the wilderness that he so loved: it restores your soul. And God knows… my tired soul needs all the restoration and re-energizing it can get.

Postings at MontanaWriter have been lean for quite some time now. I hope this will soon be changing. With the help of a second-job schedule change and Thoreau, I think it might.

In the meantime, I read Thoreau, I take walks along the river, and I listen.

 

How important is a constant intercourse with nature and the contemplation of natural phenomena to the preservation of moral and intellectual health! [Journal, 6 May 1851]

 

* * * * * * * * * *

 

I do not know where to find in any literature, whether ancient or modern, any adequate account of that Nature with which I am acquainted. [Journal, February 1851]

 

* * * * * * * * * *

 

The Indian…stands free and unconstrained in Nature, is her inhabitant and not her guest, and wears her easily and gracefully. But the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison. [Journal, April 1841]

 

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The quotable Duke

Today at MontanaWriter we begin a new feature: Western Wednesday. Each Wednesday we will highlight all things western: movies, books, art, blogs, history.

For the inaugural Western Wednesday, what better place to begin than highlighting some of the best quotes from John Wayne… beginning with my all-time favorite Duke quote from his last film, The Shootist.

If I missed any of your personal favorites, please let me know.

Enjoy!

“I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.”  – The Shootist

“Well, there are some things a man just can’t run away from.” – Stagecoach

“Sorry don’t get it done, Dude.” – Rio Bravo

“Don’t apologize—it’s a sign of weakness.” – She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

“Out here a man settles his own problems.” – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

“Whoa, take ‘er easy there, Pilgrim.”  – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

“Now you understand. Anything goes wrong, anything at all… your fault, my fault, nobody’s fault… it don’t matter…I’m gonna blow your head off. It’s as simple as that.” – Big Jake

“All battles are fought by scared men who’d rather be some place else.” – In Harm’s Way

“I haven’t lost my temper in 40 years; but, Pilgrim, you caused a lot of trouble this morning; might have got somebody killed; and somebody oughta belt you in the mouth. But I won’t. I won’t. The hell I won’t!” – McLintock

“Well, son, since you haven’t learned to respect your elders, it’s time you learned to respect your betters.” – Big Jake

“We’re burnin’ daylight.” – The Cowboys

“I’m thirty years older than you are. I had my back broke once, and my hip twice. And on my worst day I could beat the hell out of you. “ – The Cowboys

“I’m lookin’ at a tin star with a… drunk pinned on it.” – El Dorado

“ I don’t believe in surrenders. Nope, I’ve still got my saber, Reverend. Didn’t beat it into no plowshare, neither.” – The Searchers

“If anyone tries to cross that river before we’re out of sight- baptize ‘em.” – The Train Robbers

“Life’s hard. It’s even harder when you’re stupid.” – (source unknown)

“Talk low, Talk slow, and Don’t say too much.”  – (advice on acting)

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“My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.” ~Edith Sitwell

Stone Stairs (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

The most important thing to a writer is time. Time to write, time to read, time to meditate and ruminate, and time to let things sit. With two jobs and all the busyness of middle-age, there is these days in my life little time for writing or reading, or meditation and rumination… but there is plenty of time for letting things just sit and wait.

My wife is fond of quoting Stephen King who calls that kind of writing-time, “letting the boys in the basement do their work.” And so in the silences between postings here, and in the more pregnant silences between working on poetry and fiction, I am trying to do just what King suggests.

That kind of silence, however, requires patience. Patience is something I have struggled with all my life… just as it is for many I know.

Patience is, of course, one of the seven great virtues:

• Patience
• Chastity
• Temperance
• Charity
• Diligence
• Kindness
• Humility

Some of these come more “easily” to me. Some seem impossible. Patience is one of these.

St. Paul wrote of suffering that:

…we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. (Romans 5:3-5)

In the end, I think we fully learn a virtue only through suffering. Success and ease-of-life by definition make it more difficult to learn the most important lessons of life. We learn through failure not through success. That is why Jesus said, “For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

This idea is not consistent with the Gospel of Wealth that neo-pagans like Joel Osteen and Norman Vincent Peale preach. It is not consistent the anti-Christian paganism of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. It is however totally consistent with the faith witnessed to us by Paul and Peter, St. Francis and St. Claire, St. Thomas and John Paul II. It is in a word, true.

For the next month or so, postings at MontanaWriter will be sparse by necessity, and I will be re-posting –with new content and edits– some older posts that were written and posted before readership here really began to grow. Soon, “and very soon,” there will be enough time again… for new directions and trajectories. But for now, patience is the order of the day.

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” ~A.A. Milne

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As an avid collector of quotes and lines of poetry, I often find myself with unattributed lines and mis-attributed quotes. The internet, though efficient in locating and aggregating information, is not, of course, of much help in clearing up issues of accurate attribution.

But to be honest with you, if the quote is good, I really do not care. What matters to me is that the line is good. And so on hump-day of the first full week of May, here are some quotes I have collected from various sources over the years.

Let me know if there are any you especially like… or that you know are indeed misattributed. Thanks.

In the meantime, enjoy!

“Know what you are talking about.”  ~John Paul II

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.” ~Abraham Lincoln

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.”  ~Ezra Pound

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”  ~W.H. Auden

“The more we study, the more we discover our ignorance” ~P.B. Shelley

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same” ~Thomas Merton

“The desire to write grows with writing.” ~Erasmus

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”  ~Henry James

“There is no friend as loyal as a book.” ~Ernest Hemingway

“Artistic talent is a gift from God and whoever discovers it in himself has a certain obligation: to know that he cannot waste this talent, but must develop it.”  ~John Paul II

“The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.”  ~Samuel Johnson

“A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard — by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off.” ~Archibald MacLeish

“Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.”  ~Amy Lowell

“Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, squares, and the like, but for the human emotions. If one has a mind which inclines to magic rather than science, one will prefer to speak of these equations as spells or incantations; it sounds more arcane, mysterious, recondite.”  ~Ezra Pound

“Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“Your library is your paradise.”  ~Erasmus

“I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.” ~Seamus Heaney

“We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” ~Henry James

“There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience, and that is not learning from experience.” ~Archibald MacLeish

“The first draft of anything is shit.” ~Ernest Hemingway

“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”  ~W.H. Auden

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  ~Marcel Proust

“There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“Debate doesn’t really change things. It gets you bogged in deeper. If you can address or reopen the subject with something new, something from a different angle, then there is some hope…. That’s something poetry can do for you, it can entrance you for a moment above the pool of your own consciousness and your own possibilities.” ~Seamus Heaney

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.” ~G.K. Chesterton

“I don’t want everyone to like me; I should think less of myself if some people did.” ~Henry James

“The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.”  ~W.H. Auden

“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.” ~Marcel Proust

“The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man”  ~T.S. Eliot

“Stupidity is also a gift of God, but one mustn’t misuse it.”  ~John Paul II

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The feature Hugh’s Journals appears here each Sunday. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

Hugh's Notebooks

Last week’s inaugural posting of Hugh’s Journals bore a number of unexpected fruits: an email from one of Hugh’s quite distant relatives in Australia, a number of nice comments and emails from Jones family members who I know or at least know of, and… another notebook that I knew nothing of at all.

Last Tuesday I met my father-in-law for racquetball. Before getting started, he opened a plastic bag and said “I don’t know if you have seen this notebook.”

It was the same style of notebook as those Sue has inherited, a bit less faded perhaps. But where the notebooks I am familiar with… and have been reading over the years… merely have a small notation inserted on the spine  (“1958 Quotations” or “Poems A – K”) this one had a faded picture of my father-in-law as a boy. Opening it up for a cursory look, I noticed that while the notebooks I have been reading are filled with pages of hand-typed quotations, the one from my father-in-law seemed more a scrap book. There were pictures, grade school report cards, and miscellaneous other documents taped and glued on pages as well as a few pages of typed text.

Later that night, I took the new notebook out and began looking through it. There is one page with two pictures of Hugh and one of his bride, Dorothy. There is a page with my father-in-law’s 4th grade report card from Cambria, Wisconsin, attached to it, and some pages with “From the Minister’s Study” columns that Hugh had written, presumably cut from some congregational newsletter.

My favorite page has two unusual items attached to it, one above the other. On the top, is part of an old parking citation from August 20th, 1945, from  the City of Staunton, VA, made out to “Mrs. Hugh B. Jones.” Below is a smaller, square piece of paper where, presumably an outraged Dorothy, had with meticulous care drawn a map showing where “Legitmate Parking” and “No Parking” were on “Beverly St.” And where her car, and other cars were parked. Whether she had drawn this to argue her case with the City of Staunton, or more likely, to send in a letter to Hugh who was still a chaplain in North Africa, I am not sure. She was, apparently, notorious for ignoring the usual parking conventions.

A few pages in, I found the page that I am posting today.

When I came up with the idea of doing something with Hugh’s notebooks, with the pages and pages of quotations and prayers that he had taken so much time to type-out and file, it was because I had always had a vague sense that something more should be done with them. But I never knew what or why.

When I came upon this page… typed double-sided, dated February 17, 1978… I finally knew why I had had that feeling all these years. Hugh wanted to do something with them.

A few words about the names in these two pages. Hugh and Dorothy were usually called by their grandchildren Taid and Nain, the Welsh words for “grandfather” and “grandmother.” Taid and Nain had two children: Daniel (Dan) who was named after Hugh’s father, and Elizabeth (Betsy). Daniel (my father-in-law) married DeLores and they had three children: Sue (my wife), Amy, and Chris. Betsy married Bill and they had three children: Kent, Mark, and Erick.

Hugh saw the notebooks of typed pages as a legacy…. a life-time of wisdom, and study, and faith that he wanted to pass-on to his children and grandchildren.

Over the years, I guess had come to think of them that way as well. Yet also as something more that just a family legacy.

Hugh was always a pastor and a preacher… a proclaimer of the Good News. The light of what he believed – of what he knew was true – did not go out when he died. It burns in some fashion in his children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren… as it burns in the children, and grand-children, and great-grandchildren of all the saints that have gone before.

When those who have gone before are as faithful and studious as Hugh, all of us – children of God – need to hear what they have learned.

Enjoy!

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“Coffee, whiskey, and fishing poles. That’s really all you need in life.” ~ Brandi Carlile

Until yesterday morning when I heard this quote on the Current, what I knew about Brandi Carlile was her name… and that just vaguely.

Women country singers not named Emmy Lou, Jessie, Tammy, or Dolly quickly bore me. Female pop-divas leave me completely flat. I leave the whole contemporary-female-pop-country-genre/pop-diva stuff in the more than capable hands of my youngest daughter.

But how can someone who can summarize life as perfectly as the above quote NOT become my next new favorite artist.

Its official… for the next little while I am going to be listening to a singer named Brandi!

On Easter Monday.. I really can’t think of any better words to live by.

Enjoy!

T. S. Eliot reading

One the many things I have collected over the years is quotes about poetry and poets. For years, I used to keep and record my favorite quotes about poetry in a leather-bound journal that I received as a gift. Now I keep and record them electronically. It is much easier to do it that way, though admittedly much less… romantic….

On the last “hump-day” in the longest February in memory, here are just a few of my favorites. I hope you find a few you like and maybe a few new ones for your own collection.

Quotes on Poetry and Poets

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.  ~W.B. Yeats

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.  ~John Keats

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.  ~Samuel Johnson

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.  ~Robert Frost

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.  ~T.S. Eliot

Poetry is life distilled.  ~Gwendolyn Brooks

I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.  ~Carl Sandburg

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
~Robert Graves

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.  ~Robinson Jeffers

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.  ~Wallace Stevens

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.  ~Paul Valéry

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.  ~W.H. Auden

What is a Professor of Poetry?  How can poetry be professed?  ~W.H. Auden

To have great poets there must be great audiences too.  ~Walt Whitman

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.  ~W.B. Yeats

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painting by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

I love books and reading… and I love collecting quotes. On a lazy Saturday morning where all you want to do is to sit down with a cup of coffee and read, some quotes about reading and books seems like just the thing.

Here are just a few of my favorites. I hope you find a few you like and maybe a few for your own collection.

Quotes on Books and Reading

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.  ~ Groucho Marx

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.  ~ Marcel Proust

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.  ~ Thomas Jefferson

You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.  ~ C.S. Lewis

You cannot open a book without learning something.  ~ Confucius

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us. ~ Franz Kafka

‘Classic.’ A book which people praise and don’t read.  ~ Mark Twain

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.  ~ Emily Dickinson

There is no friend as loyal as a book. ~ Ernest Hemingway

The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.  ~ Samuel Johnson

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

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. ~ W.H. Auden

A book worth reading is worth buying.  ~ John Ruskin

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I do not get to fish as often as I would like, but I can still read and collect  quotes about fishing. Fishing, like baseball, lends itself to great writing. The pastoral nature of the pursuit in its purest form leads inevitably to contemplation. And contemplation leads inevitably to expression.

Here are some of my favorite quotes about fishing. Enjoy!

The gods do not deduct from man’s allotted span the hours spent in fishing. ~ Babylonian Proverb

Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.  ~ John Buchan

Fishing provides that connection with the whole living world. It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. A form of meditation, some form of communion with levels of yourself that are deeper than the ordinary self.  ~ Ted Hughes

Fishing is much more than fish. It is the great occasion when we may return to the fine simplicity of our forefathers. ~ Herbert Hoover

If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there’d be a shortage of fishing poles. ~ Doug Larson

A bad day of fishing is better than a good day of work.  ~ Author Unknown

The fishing was good; it was the catching that was bad.  ~ A.K. Best

It has always been my private conviction that any man who pits his intelligence against a fish and loses has it coming.  ~ John Steinbeck

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.  Teach him how to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.  ~ Author Unknown

Calling fishing a hobby is like calling brain surgery a job.  ~ Paul Schullery

Three-fourths of the Earth’s surface is water, and one-fourth is land.  It is quite clear that the good Lord intended us to spend triple the amount of time fishing as taking care of the lawn.  ~ Chuck Clark

You must lose a fly to catch a trout.  ~ George Herbert

A trout is a moment of beauty known only to those who seek it.  ~ Arnold Gingrich

Scholars have long known that fishing eventually turns men into philosophers.  Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to buy decent tackle on a philosopher’s salary.  ~ Patrick F. McManus

You know when they have a fishing show on TV? They catch the fish and then let it go. They don’t want to eat the fish, they just want to make it late for something. ~ Mitch Hedberg

There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot. ~ Steven Wright

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