About Me
"I belong, you must know, to that class of persons who turn day into night, and night into day, and who love everything uncommon and peculiar."
~ From The Mysterious Stranger (1860) ~
"There is in the Romantic revival a certain disquietude and a certain aspiration. It is this disquietude with earth and aspiration for heaven which inform the greatest Romance of all, Mysticism, the Romance of the Saints. The Classical writer set down fixed rules and precisely determined his boundaries. The Romantic spirit reaches out beyond these with an indefinite but very real longing to new and dimly guessed spheres of beauty. The Romantic writer fell in love with the Middle Ages, the vague years of long ago, the days of chivalry and strange adventure. He imagined and elaborated a mediaevalism for himself, he created a fresh world, a world which never was and never could have been, a domain which fancy built and fancy ruled. And in this land there will be mystery, because where there is mystery beauty may always lie hid. There will be wonder, because wonder always lurks where there is the unknown. And it is this longing for beauty intermingling with wonder and mystery that will express itself, perhaps exquisitely and passionately in the twilight moods of the romantic poets, perhaps a little crudely and even a little vulgarly in tales of horror and blood."
~ Montague Summers ~
"He lived only for his dreams, and his sadness was dearer to him than all life itself."
~ Elizabeth, Empress of Austria, about her cousin King Ludwig II ~
"It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't."
~ G.K. Chesterton ~
"Ever since I was a kid, I've always loved the sort of movie where a proper Victorian professor journeys from the smoke-filled adventurer's clubs of London to some impossible lost world in his own gilded or wrought-iron invention. The kind of story that somehow seems to bypass some of the dead-ends of certain other science fiction; seems to allow us to ponder the kind of mysteries science fiction explores so well without asking us to leave our roots in the past behind."
~ Rod Bennett ~
"Even though I have never had an abrupt conversion experience, religion has been real to me and closely knitted to life. In fact the two cannot be separated; religion for me is life."
~ Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ~
"Any movement or sound is a profession of faith, as the millstone grinding is explaining how it believes in the river!"
~ Jelaluddin Rumi ~
"We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him."
~ 1 John 4:16 ~
"I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, and never will be. Because He is God, He is good, He is truth, He is love, He is peace; and His power, His wisdom, His charity and His unity do not allow Him to be angry... God is that goodness which cannot be angry, for God is nothing but goodness."
~ Julian of Norwich ~
"Faith is the beginning, and love is the end; and the union of the two together is God."
~ Ignatius of Antioch ~
"Love all God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light! Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. And once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it ceaselessly, more and more every day. And you will at last come to love the whole world with an abiding, universal love."
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky ~
The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion! In mad game
They burst their manacles and wear the name
Of Freedom, graven on a heavier chain!
O Liberty! with profitless endeavour
Have I pursued thee, many a weary hour;
But thou nor swell'st the victor's strain, nor ever
Didst breathe thy soul in forms of human power.
Alike from all, howe'er they praise thee,
(Nor prayer, nor boastful name delays thee)
Alike from Priestcraft's harpy minions,
And factious Blasphemy's obscener slaves,
Thou speedest on thy subtle pinions,
The guide of homeless winds, and playmate of the waves!
And there I felt thee!--on that sea-cliff's verge,
Whose pines, scarce travelled by the breeze above,
Had made one murmur with the distant surge!
Yes, while I stood and gazed, my temples bare,
And shot my being through earth, sea, and air,
Possessing all things with intensest love,
O Liberty! my spirit felt thee there.
~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, France: An Ode ~
"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become reality. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word."
~ Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ~
"If your cause is just and right, sooner or later you will win. It must triumph because it is part of the warp and woof of the universe... No matter how many setbacks there may be along the road, you may be sure that some day the right and just will prevail. It will prevail simply because it is right and just."
~ Tommy Douglas ~
It is God's love that warms me in the sun and God's love that sends the cold rain. It is God's love that feeds me in the bread I eat and God that feeds me also by hunger and fasting.
It is the love of God that sends the winter days when I am cold and sick, and the hot summer when I labor and my clothes are full of sweat; but it is God who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in breezes out of the wood.
It is God's love that speaks to me in the birds and streams, and all these things are seeds to me from his will. If these seeds would take root in my liberty, and if his will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that he is, and my harvest would be his glory and my own joy.
~ Thomas Merton ~
"Another world is not only possible, she's on her way. Maybe many of us won't be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing."
~ Arundhati Roy ~
