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"Nobody can be uncheered with a balloon." (pg 77)

I think I needed some Winnie-the-Pooh. It's as deep and as simple as poetry. I should have read it years ago. But, I am enjoying it for the first time with child #5.

I thought this was just for little kids. Silly me.

So much landscape description and so much journeying.. The repetition is getting to me. But it's a favorite of my sons. And something I overheard my oldest say (age 10) keeps me pondering and keeps me reading: "You aren't manly until you've read Lord of the Rings." I really want to find out what spoke to him like that. So I continue.

...how incongruous and irritational the common temper of mankind is, especially of youth, to that reason which ought to guide them in such cases, viz. that they are not ashamed to sin, and yet are ashamed to repent; nor ashamed of the action for which they ought justly to be esteemed fools, but are ashamed of the returning, which only can make them to be esteemed wise men.

"It is wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we are blamed for them. Even our own persons in the glass are apt to change their aspect for us after we have heard some frank remark on their less admirable points; on the other hand it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them."

"...I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self-- never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action..."

"O gracious Saint Dunstan!" 🤣 Absolutely hilarious.. We laughed so hard tonight.

"... or if she could have fed her affection with those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love. That was Dorothea's bent."

Not the most convenient time for my audio hold to become avaliable! But Son #1 has been dying for me to read this. We are following along in the print book, with Andy Serkis. Enjoying it!!

"... she sat in her silent room reading in the empty house in the afternoons. The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village."

"... no one who looks to leisure simply to restore his working powers will ever discover the fruit of leisure; he will never know the quickening that follows, almost as though from some deep sleep."