Surprised By Joy Books
Showing 1-3 of 3
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (Paperback)
by (shelved 3 times as surprised-by-joy)
avg rating 4.06 — 70,897 ratings — published 1955
Still Life (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as surprised-by-joy)
avg rating 3.91 — 430 ratings — published 2015
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Paperback)
by (shelved 1 time as surprised-by-joy)
avg rating 4.18 — 59,323 ratings — published 1861
“I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge. There was no Betjemannic irony about it; only a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one's nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was.”
― Surprised by Joy
― Surprised by Joy
“To read—without military knowledge or good maps—accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then 'written up' out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in new Zealand.”
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