In Waugh’s book — and, I’m compelled to add, that fine old mini-series it was made into — religious commitments and social relations were part of a thickly detailed, complicated and ancient lived reality. The long experience of English Catholics as a religious minority, the subtle gradations of class in the British university system, the crazy quilt of sexual norms and taboos governing the lives of young adults: all of this is what makes “Brideshead Revisited” live and breathe as a novel. None of it registers with any force in this lazy, complacent film, which takes the novel’s name in vain.

A.O. Scott, on modern treatment of religion, NYT July 26th, 2008
 

Your perception of time changes as you get older, because you see how brief everything is. You see how meaningless. I don't want to depress you, but all of life is a meaningless little flicker." (Woody Allen explains that his fear of the universe's indifference began in childhood.) My mother always said I was a very cheerful kid until I was 5 years old and then I turned gloomy. (He can only attribute that shift to an awareness of death, which he claims to remember from the crib).

Woody Allen, Jenny Yabroff, Newsweek August 8th, 2008
 

Why can't evangelical authors produce a true successor to "Mere Christianity"? The main reason, I think, is that today's best scholars, like Mr. Plantinga and Yale philosophy professor Nicholas Wolterstorff, can't write for a general audience (or, in Wright's case, are distracted by the pressures of trying to help hold the Anglican church together), and the writers who can accomplish this are no longer real scholars. Lewis was both, at a time when the two were thought to be compatible. No need to borrow his bona fides because he himself was a leading medievalist and literary critic.

DAVID SKEEL WSJ online August 19th, 2008
 

He once said of a young singer who was technically perfect, but quite without feeling and expression, “she will be great when something breaks her heart.”

Elgar  William Barclay August 12th, 2008
 

This Jesus of Nazareth, without money or arms, conquered more millions than Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed, and Napoleon; without science and learning, He shed more light on things human and divine than all philosophers and scholars combined; without the eloquence of schools, He spoke such words of life as were never spoken before or since, and produced effects which lie beyond the reach of orator or poet; without writing a single line, He set more pens in motion, and furnished themes for more sermons, orations, discussions, learned volumes, works of art, and songs of praise, than the whole army of great men of ancient and modern times (1913, p. 33).

Philip Schaff The Person of Christ: The Miracle of History: January 1st, 1913
 

All beauty in the world is either a memory of Paradise or a prophecy of the transfigured world.

Nicholas Berdyaev The Divine and the Human July 30th, 2008
 

Boats are safe in the harbor; but that's not what boats are for.

  Seattle Wooden Boat T-Shirt July 24th, 2008
 

The "novel exists to be affecting...to shake us profoundly. When we're rigorous about feeling, we're honoring that." The reader, then, should approach the text as a writer, "which is [about] making aesthetic judgments."

James Wood, literary critic New Yorker,  June 12th, 2008
 

I must try to be alone for part of each year, even a week or a few days; and for part of each day, even an hour or a few minutes, in order to keep my core, my centre, my island quality. Unless I keep the island quality intact somewhere within me, I will have little to give my husband, my children, my friends or the world at large.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh Gifts From the Sea May 29th, 2008
 

Every view of the world that fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to the common problems that confront us all. Knowledge is lost, not only of the natural world, but of realms of the spirit, intuitions about the meaning of the cosmos, insights into the very nature of existence.

Wade Davis,on the loss of languages and cultures from the ethnosphere, Light At The Edge of the World May 23rd, 2008
 

We no longer feel life as people did in the past… This is the ultimate difference, the distinction that separates the truly contemporary person from all others. This acceleration (technology leading to culture shock) lies behind the impermanence, the transience, that penetrates and tinctures our consciousness, radically affecting the way we relate to other people, to things, to the entire universe of ideas, art and values.

Alvin Toffler, Toffler wrote the book on a manual typewriter, as the personal computer and internet had not yet been invented, Future Shock May 23rd, 2008
 

And now, with God's help, I shall become myself. -

Soren Kierkegaard Soren Kierkegaard May 13th, 2008
 

He's living so simply he's creating a lot of work for the rest of us.

Gandhi Friend About Gandhi  April 12th, 2008
 

The human being was created for this end: to praise, reverence and serve the Lord... I come from God. I belong to God. I am destined for God.

St. Ignatius The Ways of the Spirit Evelyn Underhill March 23rd, 2008
 

For two personalities to meet is like mixing two different chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed.

C.G. Jung  May 21st, 2008
 

Dynamic and erratic, spontaneous and radical, audacious and immature, committed if not altogether coherent. Ecumenically open and often experimental, visible here and there, now and then but unsettled institutionally. Almost monastic in nature but most of all enacting a fearful hope for society.

William Stringfellow An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land' May 22nd, 2008
 

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

John Dryden, observed in 1681, John Dryden July 4th, 2008
 

Don't play what you know, play what you don't know.'

Miles Davis  July 6th, 2008
 

Once you become real, you can't become unreal ~ it lasts forever.

Margery Williams Velveteen Rabbit August 4th, 2008
 

Back in 2002, I ran into one of the Brookings Institution’s top Middle East hands at the inaugural session of the United States-Islamic World Forum, a now annual event that Brookings sponsors jointly with the government of Qatar. “How’s it going?” I asked, expecting to hear about clashing misperceptions across the cultural divide. “Good,” came the gruff reply. “They’re beginning to realize that they are the problem.” Reading this big, ambitious book by Kenneth M. Pollack, who is the head of research at Brookings’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, it is hard not to wish that what he refers to as Washington’s “policy community” would more often realize that they are the problem.

Max Rodenbeck,reviewing Kenneth Pollack's "A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East," NYT August 22nd, 2008
 

Seattle has more bookstores per capita than any other city in the country, according to the "America's Most Literate Cities" survey conducted by Jack Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University — 174 at last count. But running a bookstore has always been an occupation for dreamers, and area independent stores have had to confront the realities of wresting a living from a low-margin business in an increasingly expensive town.

Mary Anne Gwinn, book editor, Seattle Times August 24th, 2008
 

Rant "To the couple pushing a toddler in a stroller around Green Lake on Aug. 13. Your little boy was watching a DVD on his lap, complete with headphones for easy listening. Are you kidding me? Your child does not need an activity to keep him occupied while on a walk; the walk is the activity! If your child can't go for 60 minutes without watching TV, you have a big problem. Whatever happened to watching the scenery and talking about what you see? Please, at least give him a book to look at instead."

 ,letter to the editor, Seattle Times August 25th, 2008