“How many of you know what’s important?”

Up went all the hands.

“Very good,” said Stu­art, cock­ing one leg across the other and shov­ing his hands in the pock­ets of his jacket. “Henry Rack­meyer, you tell us what is important.”

“A shaft of sun­light at the end of a dark after­noon, Con­tinue reading →

What she was find­ing also was how one book led to another, doors kept open­ing wher­ever she turned and the days weren’t long enough for the read­ing she wanted to do. 

—p. 21

‘But brief­ing is not read­ing. In fact it is the antithe­sis of read­ing. Brief­ing is terse, fac­tual, and to the point. Read­ing is untidy, dis­cur­sive, and per­pet­u­ally invit­ing. Brief­ing closes down a sub­ject, read­ing opens it up.’ 

—p. 21–22

‘Books are not about pass­ing the time. They’re about other lives.… Con­tinue reading →

This qui­et­ing of her mind rarely came on the instant. Instead her thoughts usu­ally strayed and wan­dered, hith­ered and thith­ered, unable to set­tle. In her early years in St. Frideswide’s she had fought it, try­ing to hold her mind to where she wanted it to be, and her fail­ure at it had been her con­stant trial and tor­ment until she was finally forced, humil­i­ated, to con­fess it to her then… Con­tinue reading →

Fre­visse found she had stopped and was stand­ing over the same clus­ter of red gillyflow­ers that Lady Anneys had looked at so long last evening. They seemed such sim­ple flow­ers until one not only looked but truly saw them; then, with their finely veined, del­i­cately fringed petals, their care­ful stems and leaves, their rich and sub­tle col­or­ing, they were not sim­ple at all. Beauty, at its heart, was rarely simple… Con­tinue reading →

The famil­iar web of prayers and psalms…quickly drew Fre­visse away from all the ways her thoughts had been twist­ing since yes­ter­day. That was the plea­sure and much of the bless­ing of the Offices: they were reminder that there was more than only here and this brief now; that there were other pas­sions than the pass­ing ones of the body; that there was… Con­tinue reading →

Like every mor­tal being, he [Hop­kins] will have only until night­fall if he is ever to find Christ. But if he has only logic and rea­son to count on, he sees, he will always be snail-like creep­ing onward while the elu­sive inef­fa­ble real­ity of Christ’s mys­tery seems to fly before him like some winged bird. And though he is only twenty-one, he can already feel his own evening com­ing on… Con­tinue reading →

In his jour­nals, Ger­ard Man­ley Hop­kins used two terms, “inscape” and “instress,” which can cause some con­fu­sion. By “inscape” he means the uni­fied com­plex of char­ac­ter­is­tics that give each thing its unique­ness and that dif­fer­en­ti­ate it from other things, and by “instress” he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which car­ries it whole into the mind of the beholder… Con­tinue reading →

Instead, the door stood open and some­one had already low­ered the shut­ter from the win­dow, let­ting in the soft-scented morn­ing air and a long-slanted shaft of richly golden light from the newly risen sun.… Sis­ter Thoma­sine went to stand directly in its bright­ness, her eyes shut, her face held up to the light.… Frevisse–who only slowly over the years had come to accept her as other than merely annoying–granted to… Con­tinue reading →

the Rev­erend John Bradley Dyne, the school’s iras­ci­ble head­mas­ter for the past thirty years, presents Hop­kins with a trans­la­tion of the Odyssey… inscribed with his com­pli­ments. But when, a few days later, [Hop­kins] runs into trou­ble with Dyne and refuses to bend the headmaster’s bul­ly­ing, he inks Dyne’s name out and inserts above it the Hop­kins fam­ily motto: Esse quam videri–To be rather than to seem. 

–Ch. 3, “Tow­ery City… Con­tinue reading →

The Book there on the stand proves arduous
to open, entombed as it is in lay­ers
of accre­tion, lay­ers of gloss applied
to var­ied pur­poses, hardly any of them
laud­able, so many, guarded ploys
to keep the terms quite still, pre­dictable.