"But whither am I carried away from my purposed matter, as forgetting my selfe in the delight I take of mine owne studie and profession?"

William Camden, on having caught himself on going offtopic.

‘Is that possible?’
‘I think so,’ said Professor McGonagall drily, ‘we teachers are rather good at magic, you know.’

McGonagall is love.

Never read this myself, but found it quoted and loved the list. From Salman Rushdie's "The Enchantress of Florence," a 16th century Indian emperor gives a list of what a woman of breeding must possess in the way of accomplishments ( Read more... )

From an ODNB biography of John Snagge, radio broadcaster who did commentary on Oxford-Cambridge races:

"In the intensely exciting 1949 race, when Cambridge won by a few feet, he genuinely did not know and could not see who was ahead because his BBC launch, badly piloted, slid broadside-on into the wash of another launch. His on-air comment, 'I don ( Read more... )

Interesting bit from the diary I mentioned in my last entry ( Read more... )

I've been thinking for a while about two books I read recently, one after another; but I refrained from writing anything about them here because I did not feel I had something worthwhile to say. But there's some sort of a rule about quoting someone else if you don't know what to say, and someone else's post made me think about those books again.

( Read more... )

"Not being published doesn't invalidate writing as a learning experience or as a purely fun experience. ... [I]f someone does embroidery or quilting or painting or gardening or so on, nobody would think of saying to them "If you aren't selling your work, you should stop" because that would be crazy. But people say this all the time to writers, and ( Read more... )

"The invisible woman was enjoying her plane ride. At least she was registering ironic amusement at the fact that no one seemed to notice her or cared to speak with her. She was not enjoying the trip in the sense that she was actually happy; she did not particularly care for plane rides. But it was pleasant to be going on an unexpected vacation, and ( Read more... )

My reading bent of late seems to be rather classical. Now, I started it for various reasons mostly involved with clearing my mind, but it proved to be fun. And I am apparently not the one to think so. Because "firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire" ( ( Read more... )

Carpenter quotes what Tolkien wrote about Lewis as a debater: "He was keen-witted rather than clear-sighted, logical within some given position, but in ranging argument neither lucid nor coherent..." ( The Inklings, p. 216) That's actually one of the things that disturbed me in Lewis's writings and in the way his opinions were described.