📖 Recent Quotes 📖

• All next day at Beacon House there was a crazy sense that it was everybody’s birthday. It is the fashion to talk of institutions as cold and cramping things. The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. This, which is true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.

  an excerpt from Manalive, written by G. K. Chesterton in 1912

• You are impatient with your elders, Miss Duke; but when you are as old yourself you will know what Napoleon knew— that half one’s letters answer themselves if you can only refrain from the fleshly appetite of answering them.

  an excerpt from Manalive, written by G. K. Chesterton in 1912

• What's prayer? It's shooting shafts into the dark. What mark they strike, if any, who's to say? It's reaching for a hand you cannot touch. The silence is so fathomless that prayers like plummets vanish in the sea. You beg. You whimper. You load God down with empty praise. You tell him sins that he already knows full well. You seek to change his changeless will. Yet Godric prays the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast. Prayer is the wind that fills his sail. Else waves would dash him on the rocks, or he would drift with witless tides. And sometimes, by God's grace, a prayer is heard.

  an excerpt from Godric, written by Frederick Buechner in 1980

📓 Recent Notes 📓

• Comic adventure that is very much in line with The Flying Inn and Man Who Was Thursday.

  an note about The Ball and the Cross, written by G. K. Chesterton in 1906

• Reads a bit like an LLM parody of a Chesterton, but I don't mind it! Our hero Innocent Smith takes a natural joy in being alive and infects others with the same.

  an note about Manalive, written by G. K. Chesterton in 1912

• I'm re-reading this now, and it's funny how my impression of it has changed so much since 2019. I think of it as a very impressive work, especially the second person stuff. And I loved the plotting of this, which is not always the highlight of a fantasy/scifi book. Also I'm reading it in paperback, and at the second approach I have none of that world-building fatigue at all, and am enjoying the specifics of it.

  an note about The Raven Tower, written by Ann Leckie in 2019

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