Tuesday quotes

1. How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you being to understand there is no going back. There are some things time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep...and take hold. --J.R. Tolkien


2. He who cannot draw on the three thousand years is living from hand to mouth. --Goethe


3. What she wanted from them was sympathy -- because she still felt, or at least feared, that Ivan was a good man and she had lost a prize. But if he was a good man, how could he leave me? So he must not be a good man. But if he isn't good, then why does it hurt so much to lose him? Is it my pride that's wounded?


Maybe. But she still knew, deep in her heart, that this was not true, either. Because if Ivan came back to her, even now, she would go to him. She wouldn't trust him, but she would take him back. Because she really did love him. And love doesn't dissapear just because of the vile unworthiness of the loved one.


She had always thought Ivan was the kind of man who kept a promise.


--Orson Scott Card, in Enchantment


4. Life is a great big canvas. Throw all the paint on it you can. --Danny Kaye


5. Seek the lofty by reading, hearing, and seeing great work at some moment every day. --Thomas Wilder


1. This may be the quote that elevates the entire Lord of the Rings saga for me. It's a great story, granted, (albeit a very, very male one), and I enjoyed the movies, but it wasn't until the end that I really loved it. There isn't any going back to the way it was before. There's no normal again. You simply can't. The world is different, and hurts can heal, but there will always be a scar. Or, what Tolkein said, because he said it so much better. Mostly I think of life after my mother died, although other things have left their impressions as well. None as big as that, though - that was the end of the world. Other things are merely major remodels of the world that was left after she died.

2. And now it is revealed why I love Latin so much - it's all part of uncovering the mystery and glory of human beings and my own culture. I know there are lots of different cultures and history in the world and I've even looked into a few of them (2004 was my year of Chinese history), but the history of Europe and its roots in the classical world is the history of myself and resonates the most.  And one of these days, I'll get around to reading Goethe.

3. Embarrasingly, this applied to more than one guy throughout my dating life. I wrote it down, originally, for a guy in Dallas whose name I can't even remember. I do remember that it turned out he was engaged to someone in a different state and dated me for two months before telling me, three weeks before he got married. Talk about a serious loser. I KNEW I was better rid of him, and it drove me crazy that the rejection still hurt. The coda to that story is they divorced a year later (shocker!) and he asked me out again. Absolute clueless %*&*$^#. The good part of that coda is I got to tell him so. He was actually hurt I considered him a cad. Oh my stars. People suck sometimes.  The other person it reminds me of was, of course, Voldemort.

4. I don't know who Danny Kaye is, but I like this quote. It's how I justified a totally non-justifiable trip to England just to see David Tennant play Hamlet on stage. The stage version was better than the version that ended up on DVD.

5. Oh, I was such a pretentious young adult. If I really believed this, I'd be more faithful about reading my scriptures.