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4,291
It’s like there’s a scale from 1 to 10, and you always would have sworn that someone or something mattered to you with a 10. But then you almost (or you actually do) lose her or him or it or them, and...
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Sparks
Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment in a person’s life, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life. Sophie Divry, The Library of Unrequited Love Tagged: random thoughts,...
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Homeric battle
The library is the arena where every day the Homeric battle begins between books and readers. In this struggle, the librarians are the referees. … Either they’re cowards and take the side of the...
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An instrument of torture
And my final quote from Sophie Divry’s The Library of Unrequited Love, this time on the Dewey decimal classification: What a perverse invention, an instrument of torture. … Stupid, anarchic,...
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Friendship
Friendship is a basic and vital human relationship that forms the social fabric of our lives. It is in and through friendships that we discover our identity, gain our sense of value and place in the...
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Recognition, misrecognition or non-recognition
… our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or...
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Hell
Hell is … a failure of openness, a failure of love and a consequent and dreadful entrapment within the self. Thus Tony Milligan, in Love, who goes on to note that for Milton love of others and hell,...
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The marks of oppression
As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized. … Once a situation of violence and oppression has been established, it engenders an entire way of...
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No-one told them
A lot of people never use their initiative because no-one told them to Banksy, Wall and Piece Tagged: Banksy, initiative, random thoughts
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The wrong people
World War II sent the wrong people wandering. God’s curse on Cain was intended for murderers and not their victims. Jonathan Wilson, Marc Chagall Tagged: curse, Jonathan Wilson, murderer, random...
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Hope = resignation?
Here’s another Camus quote, again from ‘Summer in Algiers’. I’m somewhat ambiguous about this one, although I can certainly see his point. Anyway, here it is: Contrary to the general belief, hope...
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Cornfields
In Deventer … there was contact with God and with every person I met …. There were cornfields I shall never forget, whose beauty nearly brought me to my knees …. And the sun, which I drank in through...
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Love recklessly
Some quotes on love and forgiveness from Francis Spufford’s recent book Unapologetic: If someone asks for your help, give them more than they’ve asked for. If someone hits out at you, let them. Don’t...
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One fingernail at a time
When Christians try to exercise power as if it were God doing it, cruelty and suffering and tyranny follow swiftly. In short order, we get the steely-eyed monks of the Inquisition trying to drag the...
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Literacy does not involve knowing the meaning of words
Wendell Berry opens his collection of essays, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, with a piece entitled ‘The Joy of Sales Resistance’, which offers some wonderfully biting sarcasm. Here are a few...
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An idea so far not accepted
‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.’ … It is an idea given to our civilization but so far not...
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Creation
Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God’s hidden Being. Philip Sherrard, Human Image: World Image: The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology Tagged: creation, Philip Sherrard,...
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In sheep pastures …
The great visionary encounters did not take place in temples but in sheep pastures, in the desert, in the wilderness, on mountains, on the shores of rivers and the sea, in the middle of the sea, in...
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Where to put one’s gratitude
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty did never quite engage me in the way that I had expected, but here are what for me were the book’s three highlights: … poetry is the first mark of the truly civilized. And so it...
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Sermons and churches
Most sermons are preached without any awareness at all that the making of sermons is an art that has at times been magnificent. Most modern churches look like they were built by robots without...
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