You have my word, and my word is stronger than OAK! Quoted in the movie Jerry Maguire
On Attitude
Life doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful! Annette Funicello
Courtesy Google Images
On perspective:
Have you heard of the 18/40/60 rule?
“When you’re eighteen, you worry about what everybody’s thinking about you. When you’re forty, you realize that it doesn’t really matter what they think about you. When you’re sixty, it dawns on you that most of them weren’t thinking about you at all!”
Daily Devotional: The Word for You Today, October 31, 2013 entry
On the Mystery of Life:
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.
Willa Cather, The Professor’s House
Who am I? We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955)
* Which quote resonates with you most in either a positive or negative way?
* What quote for the month can you add?
You comments are most welcome. I will always reply!
Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise. Maya Angelou
READING
“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” Mason Cooley, aphorist (1927- __ )
“Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head.” Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
8.28.97 Cats look down on you, dogs look up at you, but PIGS look you straight in the eye!
Peter Mayle, Chasing Cezanne
BOOKS
“A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” Franz Kafka
“Book love . . . . It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” Anthony Trollope
“A house without books is like a room without window.” Heinrich Mann, novelist (1871-1950)
“It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives.” Anna Quindlen. “Turning the Page.” Newsweek: April 5, 2010, (53).
* * * * *
8.28.97 Sometimes life is a bowl of harries! “plain and fancy girl”
10.16.98 When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand.” Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
Quote from John Bartlett, who compiled over 11,00 quotations in the 10th edition of Quotations, 1919
Writing & Stories
4.10.99 Why stories are so effective:
The best stories begin as mental pictures which turn into personal mirrors before they become insightful windows through which we’re able to view life with greater clarity and understanding. Anonymous
12.15.95 I like everything about writing except the paperwork! Novelist Peter de Vries
9.9.00 I feel 10 times smarter writing on the computer. My student, ENC 1101
Travel
There’s no cure like travel
To help you unravel
The worries of living today.
When the poor brain is cracking
There’s nothing like packing
A suitcase and sailing away.
Cole Porter – Anything Goes.
7.15.13 The only real voyage of self-discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in seeing it with new eyes. Marcel Proust
8.14.99 Distance lends enchantment to the view . . . . Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Ozarks
10.22.96 I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. Thoreau
7.28.90 The trip to heaven will be easy because I have sent my heart on ahead. Loretta Lynn
White-Water Rafting
Ocoee Rafting – Ducktown, TN
White water rafting, especially level 3 or 4, is a grand metaphor for life:
1. Trust your Guide.
2. Stay IN the boat.
3. Have fun!
Dancing with the Stars
4.16.99 I don’t try to be better than anyone else. I try to be better than myself. Mikhael Baryshnikov, dancer
5.13.90 If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. Thoreau
5.10.99 And frame your mind to mirth and merriment / Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life. Wm. Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew
A merry heart doeth good like medicine. Proverbs 17:22.
Time and Happiness
3.17.00 Human time does not turn in a circle. It runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy; happiness is the longing for repetition. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
12.28.89 How plotless real life was [is]! Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
5.9.90 Don’t worry about the meaning of life; pursue meaning in life every day. Robert Fulghum
12.19.99 You are only one thought away from a good feeling! Sheil Krystal quoted in Rick Carlson’s Happiness
9.10.13 Sybil, in my book says, “Sometimes, the greatest gift you can give someone is the freedom to pursue their own happiness.” Red Clay and Roses SK Nicholls
Purple Passages made its debut on July 10. Here is the August 10, 2013 installment.
My stack of journals minus the fatter one on my nightstand
Why people read
1.7.94 We read books to know we are not alone. William Nicholson
Love to children
4.2.89 The love you give your children is like black paper: it absorbs and you can’t see it, but you know it’s there. Mary Kalegis
Patio pose, little readers frozen in time
My Hometown
Courtesy: City of Jacksonville
7.27.91 Jacksonville . . . an Oz of blue-green skyscrapers, a city of dreams at the end of the pine-green tunnel . . . shines from a number of angles like a jewel being turned in your hand. John Updike, Rabbit at Rest
On Relationships
10.21.91 Relationships with the opposite sex reflect our efforts to find answers for problems with our parents. Relationships with our friends represent our efforts to find solutions for problems with our siblings. (Quoted by Shirley McLaine, who undoubtedly quoted from someone else.)
On Sanity
7.19.92 It occurred to her that her sanity was becoming intermittent, like a sudden stretch of intact road in an abandoned region. Or radio music, blatant after months of static. K. Braverman, Tall Tales from the Mekong Delta
On Birthdays
2.10.96 The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose the other ages you’ve been. Madeleine L’Engle
On Angels
5.8.97 Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. G. K. Chesterton
On Hope
7.11.95 As long as matters are hopeful, hope is a mere . . . platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength. Like all Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable. G. K. Chesterton, Heretics
Make one of your own!
Well, you can coin a new quote, but you could also begin or continue your own journal of purple passages:
White pages would be easier, or computer pages with a pale purple background. How about it?
Debut of purple passages! A collection of lines from books I have read since 1989 when I began jotting them down in my journals, my 9 books of wishes, dreams, laments, and bursts of praise.
The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines a purple passage as one conspicuous for its brilliance in otherwise dull writing. For this blog, I’m concentrating on only the “brilliant” part of the definition.
Although they are random in topic, I chose these quotes for at least 3 reasons: 1) they have plucked my heart-strings, 2) ignited a spark in my brain, or 3) resonated in my ear. Sometimes these ideas have even traveled to my fingers, where they become reborn as I write.
A Preview:
6.16.90 I don’t call it gossip. I call it emotional speculation. Laurie Colwin Happy All the Time
7.25.90 Auntie Ying is not hard of hearing. She is hard of listening. Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
5.28.92 Mr. Brook was a somewhat pastel person. (I wonder how that differs from a vanilla one?)Carson McCullers Collected Stories
6.28.93 I was sneezing through a traffic light. Son Joel on why he got a violation ticket.
12.21.95 The outline of what even well-educated people should know has been blurred past recognition by the many things we can know. Flannery O’Connor Images of Grace, Introduction
Ah, there is also a 4th reason. I forget stuff unless I write it down. Even books I read. I had this sensation recently when I started to read (actually, re-read) neuropsychiatric Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Now who could forget reading that book and with THAT title!
In “The Curse of Reading and Forgetting,” Ian Crouch recalls having read and then unknowingly re-read parts of several books, amazed at his book-forgetting abilities. He recalls ordering a book from Amazon only to realize after encountering an episode about a cat trying to eat a snake that he’s already read THIS book. Then, he asks:
Should we reread when there is a nearly endless shelf of books out there to read and a certainly not-endless amount of time in which to do it? Should I pull out my copy of Eudora Welty’s “The Optimist’s Daughter” to relearn its charms—or more truthfully, learn them for the first time—or should I accept the loss, and move on?
I say, accept the loss and move on. “At my back I always hear Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.”
Quotes are selected not always because I agree with them, but because they have given me cause for pause. You will be notified when new quotes are posted. Click to link to the Purple Passages menu on my blog.
1. Have you experienced the author’s sensation of having read a book before as you began to re-read it? How about movies?
2. What other “purple” quotes come to mind as you read this post?
Plain and Fancy 