The Tuesday tease:

“Are you busy with something?” said the Major. “You can always call another time, when your paperwork is finished.”
“No, no, it’s just a final deal book I have to read—make sure all the decimal points are in the right place this time,” said Roger. “I can read and chat at the same time.”
“How efficient,” said the Major. “Perhaps I should try a few chapters of War and Peace while we talk?”

Today’s TTT is “favorite book quotes”, which…no. I have seventeen years of posts here, with quotes scattered between book reviews, kindle highlights, image captions, etc. I couldn’t even restrict my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes to ten, nevermind all of them. So, I’m going to share ten Kindle highlights from the last year.

The world is full of small ignorances,” said a quiet voice. Mrs. Ali appeared at his elbow and gave the young woman a stern look. “We must all do our best to ignore them and thereby keep them small, don’t you think?” (Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand)

Three months ago RAF Oldchurch had been a collection of sheep pastures surrounding a meandering stream. One of the meadows had doubled as the village cricket field; a local rule gave an extra run to any batsman who struck a sheep, and four runs if the sheep fell over. (Breaking Point: A Novel of the Battle of Britain)

But the chapel of the Tower of London has a register that makes chilling reading. The clerk obviously got bored with laboriously copying out ‘hanged, drawn and quartered’ time after time, so he abbreviated it to ‘h d q’. (Elizabeth’s London)

In a well-known passage from Milan Kundera’s 1979 novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, one character says that “the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.” (Breaking Bread with the Dead)

Kavanaugh describes it best: “In a culture of lived atheism and the enthroned commodity . . . the practicing Christian should look like a Martian. He or she will never feel fully at home in the commodity kingdom. If the Christian does feel at home, something is drastically wrong.” (Dangerous Passions, Deadly Sins: Learning from the Psychology of Ancient Monks)

Placing undue importance on your emotions is a little like stepping onto a swivel chair to reach something on a high shelf. Emotions are likely to skitter out from under you, casters and all. Worse, attending to our feelings often causes them to intensify. Leading kids to focus on their emotions can encourage them to be more emotional. (Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up)

In the eighties, when the prevailing wisdom was that American cities were full of gangs, drugs, homeless people who raped joggers, joggers who raped the homeless, and Satanists who sat around sacrificing children and playing Dungeons & Dragons, the narrative of many a film was “moving out to the country” to get away from all the danger. But we knew what the movies did not: that the country was much worse. We had no Satanists, but we did have tractors and hay balers, which I am pretty sure killed more children during that same period than Satan ever could. Drownings, snakebites, sharpened hatchets, antler impalings, alligators, hunting accidents, runaway pulpwood trucks barreling down gravel roads: Every week, we had a new disfiguring injury to report. (The World’s Largest Man)

Thus you can do the quasi-mechanical thing, and compel children to go to school, but you cannot compel them to do the human thing, which is to learn. Or if you can compel some measure of learning — holding above their heads the threat of tests — you cannot compel the love of learning, because love, by its very nature, cannot be compelled but can only be given in freedom. (The Lies of of Our Time)

Do you see? A novel is teachable when it gives the teacher a lot to talk about besides the novel. That’s the ideal. Because, with really good literature, the author says everything there is to say. That’s why he’s the author, and you’re not. You can’t teach a good novel; you just read it. (The Reactionary Mind)

We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. (The Weight of Glory)