Quotes of the Week

Here are a few passages that jumped out at me in my reading over the past week (ok, actually since January 1st):

Blessed is the one

who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,

nor stands in the way of sinners,

nor sits in the seat of scoffers:

but his delight is in the law of the Lord,

and on this law he meditates day and night.

He is like a tree planted by streams of water,

that yields its fruit in its season

and its leaf does not wither.

Psalm 1:1-3

Every good artist knows this is true of the best work: It takes some plundering of the self. You go in there and you have a look around and you bring back something that might make people uncomfortable and you write it down – even if it’s awful, even if people don’t want to hear it, even if it makes you, the artist, seem like a freak.

Because the great writer trusts that the most terrible feeling is hardly unique.

-Claire Dederer, Monsters

For years and years, I lived this fear that I was not, am not, a good enough mother because I cannot inhabit the role with my entire being, cannot cast out the artist self, or maybe the true self, a self that is not entirely good.

– Claire Dederer, Monsters

…but (the outfits, the equipment they now had on their backs) brand new, virginal: everything (cloth, leather, steel) of top quality, like those undefiled sheets that families piously keep in reserve to wrap the dead in, as if the society (or the state of things, or fate, or the economic situation – since it seems that such matters are merely the consequence of such economic laws) that was preparing to slaughter them had covered them (like those youths primitive tribes sacrificed to their gods) with the best of everything it had in the way of material and weapons, spending needlessly, staging a barbarous display for what would one day be nothing more than pieces of twisted, rusted scrap and a few rags too big for the skeletons they fluttered over (dead or alive).

– Claude Simon, The Flanders Road

…the Word, who is the yeast that leaves not one scrap of this lump of a world unleavened, has always been hidden in this creation. He did not start being hidden in 4 BC; all He did in His time on Earth was show us His face and tell us His name – and send us out to share that Good News with everybody.

Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom

And they woke Him and said to Him, “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?” And He awoke and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” And they were filled with awe, and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey Him?”

Mark 4:38-41

The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed,

a stronghold in times of trouble.

And those who know Thy name put their trust in Thee,

for Thou, O Lord, hast not forsaken those who seek Thee.

Psalm 9:9-10