“sailors pressed into the service… whose skills and fidelity were equally suspicious.”
Edward Gibbon Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
“At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise or wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by David W. Fagerberg in First Things March 2000
In my latest National Post column I say we seem to have lost sight of what we’re trying to do on the COVID-19 pandemic, with potentially ominous consequences.
“One can’t always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.”
The narrator re his humble lifestyle as a playwright (before the adventure begins) in H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon
“The fact that… we still live well cannot ease the pain of feeling that we no longer live nobly.”
John Updike, quoted by ordained minister Kevin Little of Ottawa in an Op Ed in Ottawa Citizen June 13, 2002
“He knows he’s got Daly and Woosnam breathing down his neck in more ways than one.”
Announcer on TSN Feb. 4 1996 (specifically re Paul McGinley, in the Heineken Classic but the point is the lovely mangled metaphor)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s recent insouciant refusal even to attempt to give serious answers to Pierre Poilievre’s questions about mounting national debt.