Status Updates From The Last Puritan (Hudson Ri...

"But in Oliver puritanism worked itself out to its logical end. He convinced himself, on puritan grounds, that it was wrong to be a puritan." (from the prologue)

There are so many things called love, and only one word for them all.

Perhaps there were no great events: a great event was a name for our ignorance of the little events which composed it.

There was four times as much water as land on the globe: it would be enough if one-forth of our time and of our hearts were given to human affairs and the other three-quarters to—what? Nature, truth, God, call it what you will: that larger inhuman something that surrounded humanity, sustained it, and made it ridiculous.

Poetry, I say, is like spray blown by some wind from a heaving sea, or like sparks blown from a smouldering fire: a cry which the violence of circumstances wrings from some poor fellow.

Time often flatters the past by half-erasing it.

My dear pupil after all is an American; to him the past is foreign and dead. He is a boy, and the football matches at school seem more vital to him than the history of mankind.