Rat's Country: godawful thought

What if your mother and your husband are versions of each other?

Favorite Quotes: Writing as Engineering

"It makes us realize once again that prose is a structure in its every part, that the imagination is engineered when we write.  A sentence may be in as perfect control as a church or a bridge."

     Eudora Welty, referring to a sentence in Faulkner's "The Bear"
            "Looking at Short Stories," The Eye of the Story

Favorite Quotes: "...to love what one does..."

"To win through by sheer force of genius is one thing:  to survive and continue to create when every last door is slammed in one's face is another.  Nobody acquires genius; it is God-given.  But one can acquire patience, fortitude, wisdom and understanding.  Perhaps the greatest gift little men have to offer is this ability to accept the conditions which life imposes, accept one's own limitations, in other words.  to love what one does whether it causes a stir or not.  Of the highest men Vivekananda once said:  'They make no stir in the world.  They are calm, silent, unknown.'"

          Henry Miller, To Paint Is to Love Again

Favorite Food Quotes in Literature: Anna Karenina

Oblonsky and Levin dine at the Anglia Hotel:

"Well, then, my good man, bring us two--no, make it three dozen oysters, vegetable soup...then turbot with thick sauce, then...roast beef--but mind it's good.  And why not capon--well, and some stewed fruit..."

"What table wine would you prefer?"

"Bring us the Nuits.  No, better still the classic Chablis."

...'Not bad,' he said, peeling the sloshy oysters from their pearly shells with a little silver fork and swallowing them one after another.  'Not bad,' he repeated, raising his moist and shining eyes..."



       Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Favorite Quotes: Good people don't know they are good people...

Only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can't forgive themselves. 


                  Paul Auster, novelist and poet (b. 1947)   (I copied this from A Word A Day today)

"Harry Houdini Extricates Himself"

                         Harry Houdini Extricates Himself

Harry Houdini, submerged under water,

 has wrapped himself in rusty old chains

enclosed in  what looks like a bulletproof box.

Family and friends and naysayers, too,

watch the calm surface and think of  the struggle below.

They look at their watches and  whisper together,

then he bursts through the surface, his hands in the air.

“ I’m free!” he shouts and we breathe his relief

as well as our own.  We turn to go home

dragging the chains we wore to the shore

 when we recall he put himself in a terrible  fix,

 but  then,

by God,

 he got out of it.

Favorite Quotes: Elisabeth Bishop says a poem must have the following:

"In her notebook Bishop write that the qualities she most admired in a poem were accuracy, spontaneity and mystery."

  I can't remember where I found this quote...

        

Favorite Quotes: Oscar Wilde on two kinds of people

"It's absurd to divide people into good or bad.  People are either charming or tedious."

      Oscar Wilde

Favorite Quotes: "Alone..."

"Alone, I discovered myself looking hard at things, as if I were seeing them for the first time, or seeing them properly for the first time.  I wondered if solitude promoted this activity, or whether it was a result of having more time for everything, more time to look and see, more to concentrate on what I was seeing.

I was interested in the question because so often in the past I had thought it preferable to be accompanied to the theater, to the opera, to the ballet, on travels and vacations.  I had thought that there was a value to having someone along to "share" (how I have come to hate the flat, soft sentimental sound of that word) the experience.  but I began to see...a greater value lay in hearing and seeing from within that mysterious inner place, where the eyes and ears of the mind are insulated from the need to communicate to someone else what I experienced.  The energy necessary to express myself to someone else seemed to have been conserved for the harder look, the keener hearing."

     Doris Grumbach, Fifty Days of Solitude

Favorite Quotes: Adrienne Rich on Motherhood

"Because young humans remain dependent on nurture for a much longer period than other animals, and because of the division of labor long established in human groups...most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman."

Adrienne Rich, Of Motherhood Born:  Motherhood as an Experience and Institution

Favorite Quotes: Definition of a happy family. Really.

"Happy Family:  a collection of birds and animals of different natures and propensities living together in harmony in one cage."

     Oxford English Dictionary