“Well, that is one of the things to find out sometime [why the local roads are red]. Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive – it’s such an interesting world. it wouldn’t be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there?”
Anne in Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
In my latest National Post column I say because tyrannies are both ruthless and clueless, the Chinese Communists have no idea how bad they look using the COVID-19 pandemic as cover to crush freedom in Hong Kong.
“Few men get killed. Most of those who meet sudden ends get themselves killed.”
The narrator in “The Whosis Kid” in Dashiell Hammett The Continental Op
“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