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Quotidian

Claire — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 06:54:33 +0000

“So many in our society are totally consumed with the body – they decorate it, fix it up, clothe it, put it in a nice car, send it off to a nice house, stuff it full of food, sit in a comfortable chair, hang a bunch of jewelry all over it, take it out on a boat, let it swim, teach it to ski, take it on a cruise, and so on. But life is not contained in those things; it transcends all externals. Life comes from God – and the fullness of life from Jesus Christ.”

-Anxious for Nothing, John MacArthur

Quotidian

Claire — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 12:18:37 +0000

“Oh, it’s delightful to have ambitions. I’m so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them– that’s the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting.” ~L.M. Montgomery

Quotidian

Claire — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 19:59:00 +0000

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.”

-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

Quotidian

Claire — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:24:21 +0000

“We live in a tired world—a tired world—a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning—by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos—are obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest…. [T]he lovely lines of faith that sprung up in aspiring towers of the ancient ministers and abbeys are both worn away by time, and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress…. [T]he Scribe of Genesis did well to locate the source of all our misery in that greed for knowledge which has also been our greatest spur.”

-A.S. Byatt, Possession

Life is Beautiful

Claire — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:17:53 +0000

“All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality — the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.”

-Arthur Christopher Benson

Quotidian

Claire — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:40:11 +0000

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
— Eleanor Roosevelt

Quotidian

Claire — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 18:16:41 +0000

“You know you’ve been out of the South too long when you’re cruising in the lazy-making sunshine down a road so flat the land seems to have stretched itself out for a nap, somewhere between Faulkner’s home and Elvis’s grave, and still you can’t help but creep up on the slowpoke ahead until you’re close enough to read bumper stickers going all the way back to the first Bush. And you know you’ve been in New York too long when, at the first chance, you crank the wheel, swerve out, and gun it.”

-Josh Weil, “Ode to a Mississippi Patrolman”

Quotidian

Claire — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 19:49:39 +0000

“It seemed unreasonable, unfair, that a woman so young and beautiful should be so exhausted. Of course, it was neither unreasonable nor unfair. Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.”

-Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance (1994)

Quotidian

Claire — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 01:32:28 +0000

“There was a bakery in Raheny guarded by two women. It had the best smell of any shop. It wasn’t bread; it wasn’t a rushing smell, like steam surrounding you. It was quieter, part of the air, not warm and smothering and upsetting. The smell made me feel good. The cakes were on shelves inside the all-glass counter, not stacks of them, a few of each on plates two feet apart down the shelves; small cakes, not huge things exploding with cream. The cakes were bright, hard in a nice way – biscuits that were too good to be called biscuits. Like cakes in a fairy tale; you could have built things out of them.”

-Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Roddy Doyle

Quotidian

Claire — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:14:43 +0000

Perhaps this trauma of separation-beginning from our very birth-is the normal sequence of things and to detach oneself, to learn to move freely about the world without longings or inventions, takes years of patient learning; and even then we may turn one day and find the years hollowing a dark canyon beneath us.
-Loving Che, Ana Menendez

Every very day is a battle for independence and a grounded approach to life. – I Wynn