Words Worth Noting - November 10, 2023

“in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential…. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events…. It is vain for the supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings. To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings…. the moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty…. They say they wish to be, as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves.”

G.K. Chesterton Heretics