Purple Passages and Fine China

READING

La Lectura es el viaje de los que no pueden tomar el tren.        – F. Croisset

(Reading is the journey of those who cannot take the train.)

Marian Reading_14mos._2x4_300

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested . . . .           Sir Francis Bacon  “Of Studies”

I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.     Groucho Marx

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.    Oscar Wilde

LAUGHTER

When we laugh, a sort of temporary anesthesia is released within us that blocks the pain as our attention is diverted.      Chuck Swindoll in Five Meaningful Minutes a Day

I love people who make me laugh. I honestly think it’s the thing I like most, to laugh. It cures a multitude of ills. It’s probably the most important thing in a person.    Audrey Hepburn

CHINA   

Friendship is delicate as [china], once broken it can be fixed but there will always be cracks.    Waqar Ahmed

Pitcher Broken

It’s a wise husband who will buy his wife such fine china that she won’t trust him to wash the dishes.    – Honoré de Balzac

ChinaFine

I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and salmon sing in the street.      – W. H. Auden

We have a week and a half left of work and we are like delicate china speeding toward a brick wall. Sounds fun, huh?     – Jennifer Anniston

Start living now. Stop saving the good china for that special occasion. Stop withholding your love until that special person materializes. Every day you are alive is a special occasion. Every minute, every breath, is a gift from God.     

                   Mary Manin Morrissey

A comment? Another quotation? Both are welcome here!

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Purple Passages: A Dragon with a Gift, April 2014

LILACS

LILACS

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots and spring rain.

T. S. Eliot The Waste-Land

 

When Lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with every-returning spring.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,

Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

 

Walt Whitman, elegy commemorating the death of Lincoln, 1865

 

EASTER

Easter is very important to me, it’s a second chance.  ―  Reba McEntire

Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.    ― Pope John Paul II

 

LAUGHTER

Laughter is the shock absorber that eases the blows of life.    (Unknown)

Laughter is a tranquilizer with no side effects.  ―  Arnold H. Glasgow

 

WORK

Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else. ―  J. M. Barrie

When you can’t figure out what to do, it’s time for a nap.    ― Mason Cooley

 

CHALLENGE

Challenge is a dragon with a gift in its mouth. Dragon and Gift_final_shade+color_crop_5x5_300

Tame the dragon and the gift is yours.

Noela Evans, on persevering through problems, endurance

Shakespeare says it another way, but with a toad:  Sweet are the uses of adversity which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in his head. 

READING

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. ― Mason Cooley

One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since.   ― Beverly Cleary

Marian Reading_14mos._2x4_300 THE  FUTURE

The best thing about the future is it comes one day at a time.  ― Abraham Lincoln

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Do you believe a challenge is a dragon with a gift in its mouth? A story about this that comes to mind . . . ?

What category can you add a quote to? 

What other topics would you like to see in this monthly feature, Purple Passages?

Coming next: Mennonite Flashback III: Rabbits and Rings