Those who join in the work of animation are people who dream more than others and who wish to convey these dreams to others. After a while they realize how incredibly difficult it is to entertain others. Anyone who has tried to describe the wonderful or bittersweet qualities of his dreams should be able to understand how hard this is.
Hayao Miyazaki
Category Archives: Quotes
First Class Novels
A novel, according to my tastes, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.
Charles Darwin
The Unmanageable Self
For the quantified, self-Taylorized self, there is no one to blame when something goes wrong, when productivity and perfectibility grind to a halt — no one, that is, except oneself. For the man who is his own manager is blamed twice-over for a weak growth rate: first, for mismanaging, and second, for being unmanageable. Rather than unionizing, we feel disappointed with our own poor performance.
Source
Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Marx
I would like to… accuse Marx of plagiarism. His critique of capitalism is, in essence, the biblical concern for widows and orphans, stripped of its theological foundations and applied to the conditions of modernity.
Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p. 203 (qtd. in Keller, The Reason for God, p. 59
A Witty God
The Trinity is proof of a witty God, gently letting us know that we have brains enough to understand our world, but not His.
P. J. O’Rourke
When Must We Write?
In danger of life, our own or others, in self defense, if it the only way of saving our identity in a crisis. We must speak and write and think and teach and testify when we and our mind would disintegrate without it. We speak lest we go mad.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Fruit of Lips, p. 30
Speaking for myself, I can say that this is fairly accurate.
Profundity from My Grad School Notes
Scribbled on a classmate’s presentation outline in a class on James Joyce:
fart can be art at the right moment
Grad school was money well spent, clearly.
A Man Undertakes Formation
I was and am convinced that the primary reason American Christians are so bent and broken is that we have neglected catechesis while living in a social order that catechizes us incessantly.
Alan Jacobs
A Man Can’t Throw His Heart Away
We can’t throw our hearts away. We can’t get a new heart, or at least we cannot get a new heart on our own. If I were to make a decision to throw my old heart away, that decision would have to be made by my old heart. And if my old heart could do something as wonderful as throwing my old heart away, what is the need for a new heart?
Douglas Wilson, Ploductivity
For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God…
A Man Claimed Credit for It
Jack London claimed to write twenty hours a day. Before he undertook to write, he obtained the University of California course list and all the syllabi; he spent a year reading the textbooks in philosophy and literature. In subsequent years, once he had a book of his own under way, he set his alarm to wake him after four hours’ sleep. Often he slept through the alarm, so, by his own account, he rigged it to drop a weight on his head. I cannot say I believe this, though a novel like The Sea-Wolf is strong evidence that some sort of weight fell on his head with some sort of frequency — but you wouldn’t think a man would claim credit for it. London maintained that every writer needed a technique, experience, and a philosophical position.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (via)
Christian Leithart 