miscellany [ mis-uh-ley-nee], noun 1. a miscellaneous collection or group of various or somewhat unrelated items 2. a miscellaneous collection of literary compositions or pieces by several authors, dealing with various topics, assembled in a volume or book

Instead of articles this week, I'm going to leave a few quotes that I came across this week, reading articles or books. They are all ones I wrote down to think about later...hopefully, you will find thought provoking as well. I shall provide them for you without any commentary of my own. >Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.

— Flannery O'Connor

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.

— Gustav Mahler

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of.

— Benjamin Franklin

I just finished re-reading Fahrenheit 451 again. Here are a few quotes I marked there. They are mostly from Montag, the main character, as he reflects on the events going on around him or those societal changes that led to the place where they are in the book. If you haven't read it since high school or maybe never at all, you should try it out. It's fascinating and frightening at the same time...

There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?

More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before.

Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn’t it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.

Those who don’t build must burn. It’s as old as history and juvenile delinquents.

‘I hate a Roman named Status Quo!’ he said to me. ‘Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,’ he said, ‘shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'

#miscellanies #culture #OConnor #quotes

Never lend a book to a man as you will have to set a stick of dynamite under him before you get it back.

Flannery O’Connor, “Letter to Betty Hester” dated 12th November 1956

#quotes #reading #OConnor

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