Tuesday, January 12

More quotations, some silly

I love this. It is very silly:

"The deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue."
     Mrs. Patrick Campbell

And now, something completely different:

" . . . my music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me--the humiliation of it--as a soprano.

"These, by contrast, are the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto: rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. Once you feel it, you can always do it. You know where to go for it, though it will cost you.

"In Sacred Harp we are always singing for our fathers, our mothers, our lost. We altos hug the ground, splay out our legs, and cry from the belly; we are suspect even among our own. 'I can't sing next to one of them,' complains a pretty treble, moving down the square."

     Joan Oliver Goldsmith. How Can I Keep From Singing?

Aren't you glad you're an alto? Or don't you wish you were?

And finally:

The "six most dramatic mistakes" made by people in the course of their lives, from Cicero, a Roman stateman and orator:

  • The delusion that individual advancement is made by crushing others.
  • The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.
  • Insisting that a thing is impossible because we ourselves cannot do it.
  • Refusing to set aside our own trivial preferences.
  • Neglecting development and refinement of the mind, and not acquiring the habit of reading and studying.
  • Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.
Amazingly durable ideas.

That's all for now!

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