“One thing in my defense, not that it matters: I know something Carter never knew, or Helene, or maybe you. I know what ‘nothing’ means, and keep on playing.”
Joan Didion, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“Most famously, there is the telegram from Gilbert, who was off on a lecture tour, to Frances in Beaconsfield: ‘Am in Market Harborough. Where should I be?’ Frances wired back her unforgettable one-word answer: ‘HOME!’ It was easier, as she later explained, to get him back and then start him off again.”
An item whose author I did not record in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #3 (Dec. 2000)
“Intelligence is the power of dogmatising rightly.”
G.K. Chesterton in Platitudes Undone, quoted in “Intelligence” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“I did but prompt the age to quit their cloggs/ By the known rules of antient libertie,/ When strait a barbarous noise environs me/ Of Owles and Cuckoos, Asses, Apes and Doggs.”
John Milton On the Detraction Which Follow’d Upon My Writing Certain Treatises
In my latest Epoch Times column I say if we want cleaner politics the starting point is to cultivate our own garden by refusing to tell a lie even indirectly by sitting silently when we hear one.
“There might be a clockwork ploughman to plough the cornfields or a clockwork miller to grind the corn. I would merely add the equally human hypothesis of a clockwork householder to eat the bread. Then machines could do without men altogether.”
G.K. Chesterton in New York American Nov. 12 1935, quoted in “Robots” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“If Nature herself is so kind a mother, why should anybody be so pessimistic as to shrink from motherhood?”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News August 26, 1922, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of the mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail March 27, 2001