In accordance with my New Year's resolution, I've been reading while at the gym, instead of watching The Office reruns like I used to. It's a bit hard to read while bouncing up and down on the treadmill, because I keep accidentally skipping lines and losing my spot, but I still get a lot more done. Here are an assortment of my recent favorite quotes (DON'T skim the poetry!!! My eyes always gloss over anything in verse, by default, but these ones are SO good...):
From Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"-
Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room...wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of strong imagination, he failed.
Hahaha!!!
"I have come to bring you home, dear brother!" said the child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh. "To bring you home, home, home!"
From Tennyson's "In Memorium"-
V.
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more...
from XXIV.
And is it that the haze of grief
Makes former gladness loom so great?
The lowness of the present state,
That sets the past in this relief?
Or that the past will always win
A glory from its being far;
And orb into the perfect star
We saw not, when we moved therein?
...couldn't have said it better myself.
XXVII.
I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage
That never knew the summer woods:
I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfettered by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;
Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.
I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
So THAT'S where that comes from!!! I was so excited when I read it.
From XLVII.
Short swallow-flights of song, that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away...
From CXXIV.
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answered "I have felt."
Right-brained, and proud. :)
