“To call this a tendentious reading is to pour more soup than the bowl can hold. Mischievous or adolescent seem a little nearer the mark.”
Rex Murphy in Globe & Mail April 7, 2007 [re a Samson-as-suicide bomber version of Handel’s oratorio]
The historical approach to English Literature “has been destroyed at Cambridge and is now being destroyed at Oxford too. This is done by a compact, well-organized group of whom [F.R.] Leavis is the head. It now has a stranglehold on the schools as well as the universities (and the High Brow press). It is too open and avowed to be called a plot. It is much more like a political party – or Inquisition. Leavis himself is something (in the long run) more fatal than a villain. He is a perfectly sincere, disinterested, fearless, ruthless fanatic. I am sure he would, if necessary, die for his critical principles: I am afraid he might also kill for them. Ultimately, a pathological type – unhappy, intense, mirthless. Incapable of conversation: dead silence or prolonged, passionate, and often irrelevant, monologue are his only two lines.”
A letter from C.S. Lewis to J.B. Priestley on September 18, 1962, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis
“This rock [Plymouth Rock] has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen fragments carefully preserved in several American cities. Does not that clearly prove that man’s power and greatness resides entirely in his soul? A few poor souls trod for an instant on this rock, and it has become famous; it is prized by a great nation; fragments are venerated, and tiny pieces distributed far and wide. What has become of the doorsteps of a thousand palaces? Who cares about them?”
Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America (Lawrence’s translation) [though giving I think a bit too much credit to the Pilgrims in his talk of Puritans]
“That was by no means the first time the question had arisen whether he was more pigheaded than I was strong-minded.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue re himself and Nero Wolfe in Rex Stout “Murder is Corny” in Trio for Blunt Instruments
“All bad language necessarily weakens itself by use.”
G.K. Chesterton in The Bookman December 1931 quoted in “More About Language” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a d*** fool about it.”
W.C. Fields, quoted in the features on a DVD of six classic W.C. Fields shorts [I cast my net widely].
After describing the origins, wars, foreign intrigues etc. surrounding the big-endian/little-endian schism he claims the holy book says “‘that all true believers break their eggs at the convenient end.’ And which is the convenient end, seems, in my humble opinion to be left to every man’s conscience, or at least in the power of the chief magistrate to determine.”
Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“WHEN WE START DOWN the path of reading books that are true, we run the risk of no longer being able to understand an illiterate culture. Here are three examples and a farce. Nancy Pelosi, speaking to the press about Barack Obama after his election victory said, ‘Obama has the Midas touch!’ The crowd cheered and applauded. In Canada – that patch of snowbound woods directly north of New England – Peter MacKay, a Conservative, explained why they had just lost the election to Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. He blamed social conservatives and pro-lifers who were ‘a stinking albatross’ around the neck of the Conservative Party. The press praised his acumen. A third example: I heard a radio advertisement about a head-hunting business that specializes in finding the right employees for other businesses. They claim that they are able to find the right person just like ‘Finding the needle in the hay stack!’”
David Beresford in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)