“She can never again take a step on to green grass without wondering if it is bog.”
Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair (regarding a character who experienced a sudden personal betrayal)
“Dig the well before we’re thirsty…”
Alan Sager, Professor of Health Services, Director, Health Reform Program, Boston University School of Public Health, “How to Shape Health Care Technology We Can Afford,” presented to “Affording Health Care’s Future” Massachusetts Association of Health Plans Second Annual Conference, Boston, November 21, 2003 [please do not ask me how such a thing got into my notes]
“The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for the moment’s sake. He enjoys it for the woman’s sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last for a week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary…. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.”
G.K. Chesterton, in Illustrated London News Feb. 2, 1924, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #7 (June 1999)
“When the locusts come, they devour everything.”
Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz. Catcher in the Wry
“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow.”
“Chinese proverb” quoted in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 9, 2008
“Is the normal human need, the normal human condition, higher or lower than those special states of the soul which call out a doubtful and dangerous glory? Those special powers of knowledge or sacrifice which are made possible only by the existence of evil? Which should come first to our affections, the enduring sanities of peace or the half-maniacal virtues of battle? Which should come first, the man great in the daily round or the man great in emergency? Which should come first, to return to the enigma before me, the grocer or the chemist”
Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“Standing on the [Atlantic City in the early 1990s] Boardwalk this mild October day, one beheld the Trump Taj Mahal with that odd mixture of fascination and nausea reserved for the great blunders of human endeavor.”
James Howard Kunstler The Geography of Nowhere