Fred Jenkins > Recent Status Updates

"We live in a world in which vocational teaching matters far more than the pursuit of wisdom, or the study of civilizations past. And yet where would our world be without Horace, or Pliny, or Ptolemy?"

"Dr. Devine's annoyance grew-along with his discomfort-as gnome after gnome popped its impudent head out from stock cupboard and locker room; from briefcase, bookshelves, and flowerbeds, sometimes wearing a House tie, sometimes bearing a label-Peripatetic Gnomad, Gnomic Utterance, or simply Human G-gnome."

A bar named Cicero's. How wonderful!

Reading John for Advent.

"Gabriel!" she shouted after him. "Don't be stupid! Nothing is what it seems!"

"More gunshots rang inside the trailer. A handgun, Procter thought, operated by a moron."

"It's a challenge to wrestle your demons and gators at the same time."

Finn Gosford was a politician, a word that curdled in Proctor's ears like vile slander.

The Coma Berenices always seems just a bit too precious.

"Most of my goodbyes took place in La Plata, where I grew up; the kids there were educated for exile. They learned languages as a means of escape."

-μι verbs. When I took first-year Greek long ago, Mrs. Pearson, our teacher, said that she got up an hour early to review before teaching them.

"I feel sorrow for all my lost lives, the possible paths not taken, every crossroads, every decision."

"It's like sending Zuleika Dobson to make a survey of the Snakes in Ireland."

"knowledge, even if it is power, is still not consolation"

"One shop advertises raccoons for sale. A notice, signed by a certain Bobby D., says he opens at nine or ten, or sometimes at seven in the morning, and, when he feels like it at noon; that he closes at five or six, but sometimes at eleven or midnight. That sometimes he doesn't come in at all and lately that he is there all the time, except when he is not."
(in Algiers, La.)

"President Robbins, judge him as you please, was not human. He had not time to be; besides, his own gift was for seeming human."

"Sandor and some barroom accomplices perform a snatch-and-grab in the middle of the night, the pig pretending to be asleep, as she is picked up, installed in the sidecar of Sandor's rig, and spirited away, just like that. Next thing anybody knows she's riding in the sidecar, done up in helmet and goggles, beaming, posing like a princess in a limousine."

"Just down the road from Racine, where Danish pastries were invented."

Indeed, time for a Racine kringle and coffee!

σοφία γάρ ἐστι καὶ μαθεῖν ἃ μὴ νοεῖς.
Menander