In my latest Epoch Times column I offer principles not predictions to navigate the stormy waters of 2025.
“What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry – but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own sceptical mind, is a doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, so long as he wrote Good Poetry.”
G.K. Chesterton in “About Poetry” in As I Was Saying quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)
“I was an insatiable book reader from the age of five. The list below of some of my favourites as a teenager may give the impression that I’m showing off, but I’m not: it is quite honest. History of England by Macaulay, Essays by Francis Bacon, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Vanity Fair by Thackeray, Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, Poems by John Keats, Paradise Lost by John Milton, the Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, and the novels and stories of Rudyard Kipling. Thank you for reminding me of those wonderful days when I read so many exciting things the first time period./ Sincerely, Rex Stout.”
Nero Wolfe creator Rex Stout in response to the school newspaper of Junior High School 115 in New York City asking him in 1967 “Which book or books were your favourites as a teenager and why?” [in a note at the end of Rex Stout Three Witnesses]
“Asses would rather have refuse than gold.”
Heraclitus, quoted by an author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine November 1992
“‘Bravo, Watson! Voila la devise de notre firme: nous allons essayer en tout cas.’”
Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle Archives sur Sherlock Holmes [a 1956 translation]
“We know that happiness comes to men when they are caught up, absorbed in a meaningful task or duty to be done, a task or duty which in turn sheds justification and sanction back down upon their humble labors.”
Mr. Max in Richard Wright Native Son
“’Christmas is a typical case of the old Christian tradition, precisely because it gathers so many things into itself, including things that are pagan. People talk about Paganism in Christianity, and do not realize that even by that metaphor of measurement they are implying that Christianity is larger than Paganism.’”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Nov. 11, 1928 quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 15 #2-3 (November-December 2011)
“a noodle shop between two skyscrapers.”
The self-deprecating self-assessment of incoming Japanese Prime Minister Keizō Obuchi, quoted in Ottawa Citizen July 25, 1998 [and he duly died after less than two undistinguished years in office... but it’s not obvious that his predecessor or successor were skyscrapers either].