Fr. Bruce Wren

“When we reflect that her century was the brutalest, the wickedest, the rottenest in history since the darkest ages, we are lost in wonder at the miracle of such a product from such a soil. The contrast between her and her century is the contrast between day and night. She was truthful when lying was the common speech of men; she was honest when honesty was become a lost virtue; she was a keeper of promises when the keeping of a promise was expected of no one; she gave her great mind to great thoughts and great purposes when other great minds wasted themselves upon pretty fancies or upon poor ambitions; she was modest, and fine, and delicate when to be loud and coarse might be said to be universal; she was full of pity when a merciless cruelty was the rule; she was steadfast when stability was unknown, and honorable in an age which had forgotten what honor was; she was a rock of convictions in a time when men believed in nothing and scoffed at all things; she was unfailingly true to an age that was false to the core; she maintained her personal dignity unimpaired in an age of fawnings and servilities; she was of a dauntless courage when hope and courage had perished in the hearts of her nation; she was spotlessly pure in mind and body when society in the highest places was foul in both—she was all these things in an age when crime was the common business of lords and princes, and when the highest personages in Christendom were able to astonish even that infamous era and make it stand aghast at the spectacle of their atrocious lives black with unimaginable treacheries, butcheries, and beastialities.”
― Mark Twain, Joan of Arc

“At a certain place in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he might feel that he is floating above the earth in a starry dome, with the dream of immortality in his heart; all the stars seem to glimmer around him, and the earth seems to sink ever deeper downwards.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits

“CRUISING WITH THE BEACH BOYS So strange to hear that song again tonight Traveling on business in a rented car Miles from anywhere I’ve been before. And now a tune I haven’t heard for years Probably not since it last left the charts Back in L.A. in 1969. I can’t believe I know the words by heart And can’t think of a girl to blame them on. Every lovesick summer has its song, And this one I pretended to despise, But if I was alone when it came on, I turned it up full-blast to sing along— A primal scream in croaky baritone, The notes all flat, the lyrics mostly slurred. No wonder I spent so much time alone Making the rounds in Dad’s old Thunderbird.”
― Dana Gioia, 99 Poems: New & Selected

“Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept and accept the end Of a love or a season?”
― Robert Frost, The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged