Quotation Saturday
Mamacita says: It’s time for Quotation Saturday! Where did the week go, anyway?
1. Do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not. –Thomas Huxley
2. Sometimes, when I look at my children, I say to myself, “Lillian, you should have remained a virgin.” –Lillian Carter
3. Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement. –Mark Twain
4. By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, yhou’ll become a philosopher. –Socrates
5. I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back. –Zsa Zsa Gabor
6. I don’t feel old. I don’t feel anything until noon. Then it’s time for my nap. –Bob Hope
7. The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather, they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. the same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed. –Gil Bailie
8. When you battle with your conscience and lose, you win. –Henny Youngman
9. The finest words in the world are only vain sounds if you cannot understand them. –Anatole France
10. The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. –John Stuart Mill
11. In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards. –Mark Twain
12. Character is what you are in the dark. -Dwight L. Moody
13. A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes – and it will come – may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system. -Jane Smiley
14. The U.S. Constitution doesn’t guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. –Benjamin Franklin
15. A pastor I work with claims the definition of praise music is “four words, three notes, two hours.” –Unknown
16. Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. –Nathaniel Hawthorne
17. Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled “This could change your life.” –Helen Exley
18. A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. –Jo Godwin
19. God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide. –Rebecca West
20. A word after a word after a word is power. –Margaret Atwood
21. Words are so erotic, they never tire of their coupling. –Stanley Kunitz
22. “Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are” is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread. –François Mauriac
23. There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. –Joseph Brodsky
24. Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. –Heinrich Heine
25. Water which is too pure has no fish. –Ts’ai Ken T’an
26. When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. –Einstein
27. You have to pay dearly for being an imaginative person. You see a great deal and feel a great deal, but there is ugliness to see and feel as well as beauty, and in yourself as well as in others. –Unknown
28. Men build too many walls and not enough bridges. –Isaac Newton
29. Today the world changes so quickly that in growing up we take leave not just of youth but of the world we were young in. –Peter B. Medawar
30. It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages. –Friedrich Nietzsche
31. The minute I heard my first love story I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along. -Jalal ad-Din Rumi
32. Remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall – think of it: ALWAYS. –Gandhi
33. God loves us the way we are, but too much to leave us that way. –Leighton ford
34. I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: “No good in a bed, but fine against a wall.” –Eleanor Roosevelt
35. The test of a work of art is, in teh end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good. –Stanley Kubrick
36. In politics, absurdity is not a handicap. –Napolean Bonaparte
37. If the truth doesn’t save us, what does that say about us? –Lois McMaster Bujold
38. True remorse is never just a regret over consequences; it is a regret over motive. –Mignon McLaughlin
39. I don’t trust a man who uses the word “evil” eighteen times in ten minutes. If you’re half evil, nothing soothes you more than to think the person yhou are opposed to is totally evil. –Norman Mailer
40. My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. –Mark Twain
41. You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you. –John Wooden
42. Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear. –Harry S Truman
43. The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude. –William James
44. If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. –Antoine de Saint-Exupery
45. Only the madman is absolutely sure. –robert Anton Wilson
46. It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth. –John Locke
47. To profess to be doing God’s will is a form of megalomania. –Joseph Prescott
48. Faith which does not doubt is dead faith. -Miguel de Unamuno
49. I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. –Abraham Lincoln
50. Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product. –Eleanor Roosevelt
Things
Mamacita says: Clutter.
I think far too many people set far too much store on “things.” The value of our “things” – be it sentimental or actual – is often so high, in our minds, that it is inconceivable to us that everyone in the world doesn’t want a chance at our “things.”
Thieves steal other peoples’ things. Things are ruined by flood, tornado, hurricane, and other natural disasters, for Mother Nature also seems to want a chance at our things.
Some of our things are necessities, of course, but others are just pretty, or sentimental, or add to the decor in some way, or help us remember someone else. There is no need to get rid of everything, but wouldn’t a happy medium be nice?
The older we get, the more people we know and have known, the more experiences we’ve had that we want to remember, etc, and the clutter souvenirs and mementos start to pile up.
We’ll be adding some of my MIL’s things to the things we already have, but to do that, we’ll first have to get rid of some of OUR things. We work all day, and many nights, so until we can find a few larger blocks of time, some of her things will remain in her house and other of her things will join our things, but until we get rid of some of our things there’s no ROOM for her things so her things will be sitting in the middle of various rooms until such time as we can find time and space for them.
I’ve also discovered that certain things that once held great value of some kind for me no longer do so, and I can give them away or even discard them without a lot of gnashing of teeth and unfettered weeping.
What I’m really discovering – once again, because I already knew this but it fades back in between times – is that the blending of our loved ones’ “things” with ours, is a kind of continuity of life.
In my home, there are things that once belonged to parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, friends. . . . when I see and use these things, it’s almost as if someone I loved and lost is there with me again.
Grandma’s bowl, Mamaw’s serving dishes, Mom’s casseroles, Dad’s books, Grandad’s toolbox, Papaw’s hat, Great-grandma’s aprons. . . . Our beloved dead aren’t really gone, you know. Bits and pieces of them are still here with us, carrying on with us in a day-to-day fashion, and when we use the “things” they left behind, still warm inside with the heat of their hands and bodies, shiny with the patina held only by silvery things that have been handled by many, many people – no new silver shines quite like old silver – they are with us again. The fingerprints of our beloveds are all over the most important “things,” and the MOST important thing they’ve marked is our hearts.
Vases break. Flowers die. Fabric rots. Pictures fade. But memories? Nobody can take those from you. * Even Mother Nature’s worst can’t wash away the memories.
Best of all? When the family gathers to SHARE memories. No mere treasure can hold a candle to it.
*Except perhaps Mr. Alzheimer, but we won’t go there
Ten Things Tuesday
Mamacita says: It’s time for Ten Things Tuesday.
1. Cleaning out someone else’s house makes me want to go home and clean out my own house. Bare, blank walls. Stark, sparse furniture. Empty closets. Nothing in the attic or garage except bats and cars, respectively. To quote my lovely friend Monty, “I’m just sayin’.”
2. How many sets of dishes does one person really need? More and more I’m starting to think, maybe. . . one each? Plate, I mean.
3. I love dishes, so #2 really isn’t a viable option. But it crosses my mind all the same.
4. I think that when a towel is so old it has become transparent, it’s long past time for a decent burial. How absorbent could something like that be? (Note to self: see what’s in the back of the linen closet before imminent death; check bottom of laundry basket while you’re at it.)
5. I found a baby bottle nipple in my desk drawer. My babies are older than I was when I had them.
6. I found an Easter egg under the couch last night.
7. Did I ever claim to be a good housekeeper? I don’t think I did! Anyway, I’m not. I wish I was, though. It does get embarrassing when sock-footed guests run twisted Christmas ornament hooks through their socks in February, though. I blame all that stuff on the cats these days. Nobody believes me, but I feel less domestically challenged when I pretend I don’t know how that stuff got there.
8. When I was young, I wasn’t particularly sentimental. Now, however, I even embarrass myself.
9. The dealings and trappings of death these days make me feel as though I were dealing with ghouls and agents of the macabre: fakery, backless clothing, and all.
10. I love my family and I don’t care who knows it. (See #8 up there.)
