Tom

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water–-peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul.”
― David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

“A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.”
― Astrid Lindgren

“Chapter 10 — GOD IS GREATER THAN THE DEVIL I want my readers to see how much greater God is than the devil is. God can take a man who is as crooked as the roundhouse, give him one touch, and make him as straight as a gun barrel. But let the devil take a straight man, and if the man will yield himself completely to the devil’s power, he can make him too crooked to sleep in the roundhouse. The devil has the power to make a man crooked, but it takes God to make a man straight.”
― Reuben A. (Bud) Robinson, Religion, Philosophy, and Fun