Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.
Kelsie
“Knowledge is merely knowing that certain things are, but wisdom is knowing how the souls of things rhyme with each other.”
-Joshua Gibbs, Something They Will Not Forget
“A well crafted novel is often superior to any other kind of reading, because change occurs first in our imaginations.”
-Cindy Rollins, Beyond Mere Motherhood….
I think (apparently I forgot a citation here…)
“We quarreled because we loved each other, I have no doubt of that. We were trying to become somehow the same person, one flesh, and we often failed…It’s not a simple thing, this love.”
-Hannah…I mean Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter
Jess
“For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact that happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat…Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years…Happiness depended on not doing something.”
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.”
-G.K. Chesterton’s character Michael Moon, from Manalive
“Life, dear friends, is the open hand - death, the same hand closed.”
-Leon Bloy’s character Clotilde, from The Woman Who Was Poor
“Sudden insight into the structure of one’s own soul can come on one like the eruption of a volcano.”
-Sigrid Undset, St. Catherine of Siena
Hannah
“the world is eaten up by boredom. To perceive this needs a little preliminary thought: you can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is often so fine, it doesn’t even grit your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be forever on the go. And so, people are always “on the go.”
-Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest
“I still preserve those relics of past sufferings and experience, like pillars of witness set up in traveling through the valve of life, to mark particular occurrences.”
-Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey
“Aslan is a lion - the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh, said Susan, I’d thought he was a man. Is he - quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion…”
“Safe? said Mr. Beaver…”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
-C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
We would love to hear some of your favorite quotes from your reading this month!
In Case You Missed It
Reading Revisited ep. 2: What We’re Reading- June 2024 with and
The Remains of the Day-Final Thoughts (and discussion questions) by
A Few Reminders
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Book lists from previous years can be found here.
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My favorite passage in everything I have ever read -- well, exclusive of the Bible -- is from chapter 13 (I believe) of East of Eden. It's not from this month, but I have it in my digital commonplace and here it is:
Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then-the glory-so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories. It is a lonely thing but it relates us to the world. It is the mother of all creativeness, and it sets each man separate from all other men.
I don't know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking. In our time mass or collective production has entered our economics, our politics, and even our religion, so that some nations have substituted the idea collective for the idea God. This in my time is the danger. There is great tension in the world, tension toward a breaking point, and men are unhappy and confused.
At such a time it seems natural and good to me to ask myself these questions. What do I believe in? What must I fight for and what must I fight against?
Our species is the only creative species, and it has only one creative instrument, the individual mind and spirit of a man. Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in music, in art, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man.
And now the forces marshaled around the concept of the group have declared a war of extermination on that preciousness, the mind of man. By disparagement, by starvation, by repressions, forced direction, and the stunning hammerblows of conditioning, the free, roving mind is being pursued, roped, blunted, drugged. It is a sad suicidal course our species seems to have taken.
And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.
pg. 131-132 in my edition
I love this idea so much, thanks for this post!
This month I finished Middlemarch. Here were some of my favorite quotes:
"The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quiet masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character."
"He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others. He had a certain shame about his neighbor's errors, and never spoke of them willingly."
"She had that rare sense which discerns what is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring."
"I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are."
"What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?"