August Commonplace
A place for us to share some tidbits from our commonplace books!
Happy Friday, everyone! Here’s to hoping we’ll all get lots of reading time this weekend. Feel free to share some favorites from your commonplace book this month in the comments!
Jessica
“I know that sometimes a lie is used in kindness. I don’t believe it ever works out kindly. The quick pain of truth can pass away, but the slow, eating agony of a lie is never lost. That’s a running sore.”
-John Steinbeck’s character Lee in East of Eden, 429
“The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.”
-C.S. Lewis’ character George MacDonald in The Great Divorce
“I am not suggesting that all works of literature are much the same work or fit into the same general scheme. I am providing a kind of resonance for literary experience, a third dimension, so to speak, in which the work we are experiencing draws strength and power from everything else we have read and may still read, and second, that strength and power do not stop with the work out there but enter into us.”
Kelsie
“The trouble with you dear, is that you think of an angel of the Lord as a creature with wings, whereas he is probably a scruffy little man in a bowler hat.”
-Josephine Tey’s character Aunt Lin in The Franchise Affair
“The literary life is not a book list to accomplish, so there’s no race to finish it. It’s a way of being. It’s a way of interacting with the world of ideas…”
-Angelina Stanford from The Literary Life Podcast ep. 231
“Pagans repeat their prayers because their gods have thick skulls, and Christians repeat their prayers because they have thick skulls.”
-Joshua Gibbs, Something They Will Not Forget
Hannah
“Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.”
-G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens: A Critical Study
“We have only one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal.”
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“if everyone has to go to a designated public wilderness for the necessary contact with wildness, then our parks will be no more natural than our cities.”
-Wendell Berry, Getting Along with Nature, Home Economics
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From East of Eden (which I just read): "It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world." - John Steinbeck pg. 543 East of Eden