“‘The idea that going to the beach was good for you was a creation of 18th-century Britain,’ writes Charles Leadbeater in Prospect magazine. ‘Entrepreneurs keen to promote an alternative to the spa hit upon the idea that immersing people in cold salty water might be healthy. One of the first recorded bathing expeditions took to the North Sea at Scarborough in 1627. A century later, a string of seaside alternatives to the spas at Bath and Buxton were well established. Before that, beaches had been regarded as hostile places, at best a working space for people who made their living from the sea: fishermen, smugglers, wreckers. Swimming for pleasure, and sunbathing, were unheard of.’”

“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail September 15, 2004

“Leola had just joined the great company of the walking wounded in the battle of life.”

Robertson Davies Fifth Business

“I knew a wise man that had it for a by-word, when he saw men hasten to a conclusion, Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner.”

Francis Bacon, Bacon’s Essays (edited with Introduction and Notes by F.G. Selby)

“For parents who would take a scorched-earth approach to religion...”

Janet Scott Barlow in Chronicles magazine September 1991

“’Your chief trouble,’ he [a mid-rank gangster to the narrator, Archie Goodwin] said, not offensively, ‘is that you think you’ve got a sense of humor. It confuses people, and you ought to get over it. Things strike you as funny.... but someday something that you think is funny will blow your g****m head right off your shoulders.’ Only after he had gone did it occur to me that that wouldn’t prove it wasn’t funny.”

Rex Stout In the Best Families

“One can always tell when one is getting old and serious by the way that holidays seem to interfere with one’s work.”

“Bob Edwards in the Calgary Eye Opener, 1913” quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail August 5, 2002

“The great moralists of the past – Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas, and Samuel Johnson – all had this in common, a willingness to face the facts about the human race without despairing...”

An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine April 1988 [the piece continued “and it is to that company that Joseph Pieper belongs” and I assume it was a book review]

“We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand – happy ignorance – that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty; the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a path in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.”

“War-Time Santa Claus” in Stephen Leacock On the Front Line of Life