301 Sociology:
“Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.”― Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
303 Leadership:
“I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”― Brené Brown, Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts.
“The problem with your company is not the economy, it is not the lack of opportunity, it is not your team. The problem is you. That is the bad news. The good news is, if you're the problem, you're also the solution. You're the one person you can change the easiest. You can decide to grow. Grow your abilities, your character, your education, and your capacity. You can decide who you want to be and get about the business of becoming that person.”
― Dave Ramsey, EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches
306.1 Subculture
In 1990, I left a small town in the Midwest and went to Italy to spend a year as an exchange student. What I encountered there was a shock, and what followed was one of the most difficult years of my life. When I got home, I was not the same. How was that possible? How could moving from one place, from one language, from one culture to another…change who you are? Yet it did. After one short year immersed in Italian society, I felt like a different person, and I was disturbed by the depth of this change. I didn’t feel completely American any more, but neither did I feel Italian. I had, it seemed, left something behind. What I didn’t know at the time was that that year abroad marked the beginning of a quest—one that would take years to understand, let alone complete. The Geography of Madness is the story of that search, which would take me to places I’d never dreamed I’d go—to Nigeria, Thailand, Borneo, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, and elsewhere. In those places I found wandering fox ghosts and lizards that crawl under your skin, poison pork, and poisoned minds. I also came to see how our ideas can kill us, how our beliefs can save us, and how these things quietly determine the course of our lives.
Frank Bures, The Geography of Madness (2016)
306.8 Sex
Throughout history, people have had children despite lacking the resources to support themselves, let alone provide a high quality of life for their offspring. Today, there are Western teens and young adults who have children earlier than they planned because evolution has predisposed them to reach their peak fertility years during the “adolescent” stage that contemporary society has constructed. These people were driven by a biological tendency to procreate, because natural selection favors projecting genes into the future over the well-being of an individual’s health, sanity, and bank account. As Helen Epstein commented in a report about AIDS in Africa, “If sex were an entirely rational process, the species would probably have died out long ago.”
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Sex occupies a significant spot in our civilization, as both a want and a need. Biologically, we need sexual reproduction for our species to survive. Advertisers manipulate the natural human urge to procreate and condition us to desire sex even more by branding our favorite nonsexual products (such as beer, body spray, and food) with sexual images, and by constantly sending subliminal messages that sex can be obtained by purchasing a particular product. Add in religious and cultural taboos relating to sexual behavior, and you get a forbidden-fruit syndrome that makes discussing, analyzing, and having sex an alluring and forbidden act often regarded with simultaneous shame and elation.
Ross Benes, (2017) The Sex Effect: Baring Our Complicated Relationship with Sex
All these features of human sexuality—long-term sexual partnerships, coparenting, proximity to the sexual partnerships of others, private sex, concealed ovulation, extended female receptivity, sex for fun, and female menopause—constitute what we humans assume is normal sexuality. It titillates, amuses, or disgusts us to read of the sexual habits of elephant seals, marsupial mice, or orangutans, whose lives are so different from ours. Their lives seem to us bizarre. But that proves to be a species-ist interpretation. By the standards of the world’s 4,300 other species of mammals, and even by the standards of our own closest relatives, the great apes (the chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and orangutan), we are the ones who are bizarre.
Jared Diamond, Why Is Sex Fun? (Science Masters) (1998)
Holy Sex-lovemaking that occurs in the free union of a married man and woman-allows a couple to safely overcome the overactive sense of shame that cause people to hold back when they ought to give themselves more freely to each other and to God. When a husband and wife in a truly committed, loving, generous, and respectful relationship make love with one another, they are given the grace, over time, to overcome their temptation to use one another or fear being used by one another.
Infallible Lovers never restrain their passion for one another, but they are always mindful that love is the point of lovemaking, not creating some sexual drama.
-Gregory K. Popcak, PH.D., Holy Sex: A Catholic Guide to Toe-Curling Mind-Blowing, Infallible Loving
Sex is one of those rare topics wherein the desire for others to keep the nitty-gritty of their experiences private is stronger even than the wish to keep mum on one’s own nitty-gritty.
Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they’re seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing H. sapiens, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It’s just something you do sometimes.
Sexual desire is a state not unlike hunger. You may find yourself getting up for a snack long before you’re aware of a physical sensation.
Your genes want you to get pregnant, and hormones are their magic wand. Primate sex hormones make individuals perceive other individuals as more attractive than they’d normally perceive them. Hormones are nature’s three bottles of beer.
― Mary Roach, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex
306.8 Marriage and Family:
First comes Love:
“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss
“We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness—and call it love—true love.”
― Robert Fulghum, True Love
Then Comes Marriage:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
“Married life can seem as if it's only five days long. The first day you meet, the second day you marry, the third day your raise your children, the fourth day you meet your grandchildren, and the fifth day you die first or bury your spouse to go home alone for the first time in many years.”
― Mark Driscoll, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together
“Friendship fuels the flames of romance because it offers the best protection against feeling adversarial toward your spouse.”
― John M. Gottman, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert
LOVE is primarily in the will, not in the emotions or the glands. The will is like the voice; the emotions are like the echo. The pleasure associated with love, or what is today called “sex,” is the frosting on the cake; its purpose is to make us love the cake, not ignore it.
There are two extremes to be avoided in discussing married love: one is the refusal to recognize sexual love, the other is the giving of primacy to sexual attraction. The first error was Victorian; the second is Freudian. To the Christian, sex is inseparable from the person, and to reduce the person to sex is as silly as to reduce personality to lungs or a thorax.
― Fulton J. Sheen, Three to Get Married
Parenting:
“The job of parents is to model. Modeling includes how to be a man or woman; how to relate intimately to another person; how to acknowledge and express emotions; how to fight fairly; how to have physical, emotional and intellectual boundaries; how to communicate; how to cope and survive life’s unending problems; how to be self-disciplined; and how to love oneself and another. Shame-based parents cannot do any of these. They simply don’t know how.”
― John Bradshaw, Healing the Shame that Binds You
Who is fostering the myth that there is a correct way to handle every situation? Nearly everybody-the media, the experts, and most of all parents themselves.
Most problems can be handled any number of ways, and often the more creative ways work best, even though you wouldn’t find them in a book of “how to’s.” You and your child are unique, and books can only offer general suggestions. How cleverly you use those suggestions, or come up with your own, is up to you.
The reality is that your methods can be effective or ineffective, helpful or useless. Instead of judging your actions as right or wrong, apply the key question: Is this working or isn’t it? This is a much more meaningful test of your methods and it will make you less likely to downgrade yourself as a parent.
-Raymond N. Guarendi Ph.D., You’re a Better Parent Than You Think! A Common-Sense Parenting
For many the call to adopt comes when the phone rings, and they hear of a baby or child ready for them. The internal call has been ringing steadily, as they’ve been childless and long ready to be child-more. In other words, for those wanting to adopt to start a family, the call is pretty clear. It’s what they want, and it’s been what they’ve wanted.
Granted, ten kids isn’t for everybody. There are simpler ways to get tax deductions. Nevertheless, as we asserted our lives though the years, obviously with no guarantees on the future, we really had no reason to keep us from seeking to adopt another child. Fortunately for us, we kept having no reasons for the next few kids.
Whether you’re thinking of expanding form none to one, one to two, two to three or nine to ten, do a little personal home study. Is your marriage solid? Is your home life a source of contentment? Are your finances manageable? Is your house able to accommodate another? Are your work schedules amenable? Are you emotionally healthy? Do you need another player for the soccer team?
-Raymond N. Guarendi Ph.D., Adoption: choosing it, living it, loving it.
310 Statistics
All experiments are sloppy and that very seldom does even the most careful scientist get the number right. Little unforeseen and unobservable glitches occur in every experiment. The air in the room might be too warm and the sliding weight might stick for a microsecond before it begins to slide. A slight breeze from a passing butterfly might have an effect. What one really gets out of an experiment is a scatter of numbers, not one of which is right but all of which can be used to get a close estimate of the correct value. The results of individual experiments are random, in the sense that they are unpredictable. The statistical models of distributions, however, enable us to describe the mathematical nature of that randomness.-David Salsburg, The Lady Tasting Tea
320 Politics:
“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future. ”― John F. Kennedy
“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
― Ronald Reagan
“The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government
330 Economy:
“...Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly — the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
According to a 2009 US Department of Labor report, the average American family of three spends about $ 6,133 per year on groceries. That’s $ 511 each month and breaks down to $ 170 per person! If you’re like the average family and we could help you reduce your food bill just 20 percent, at the end of the year you’d have over $ 1,200 in the bank. Wow, that’s not just pocket change— that’s some real savings. And if you learn to use a few more strategies, you’ll easily save 50 percent or more.
-Steve & Annette Economides, Cut Your Grocery Bill in Half with America's Cheapest Family
“Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not. Often, as in the case of term life insurance prices, the information existed but in a woefully scattered way. (In such instances, the Internet acts like a gigantic horseshoe magnet waved over an endless sea of haystacks, plucking the needle out of each one.) The Internet has accomplished what even the most fervent consumer advocates usually cannot: it has vastly shrunk the gap between the experts and the public.”
― Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
331 Labor
People are engaged in thousands of jobs. Whom to visit? Whom to pass by? In talking to the washroom attendant, would I be remiss in neglecting the elevator operator? One felt his job “obsolete.” Wouldn’t the other, too? In visiting the Chicago bookbinder, I missed the old Massachusetts basket weaver. I had been told about the New Englander, who found delight in his work. So did my Chicago acquaintance. Need I have investigated the lot of an assembler at the electronics plant, having spent time with spot-welders at Ford?
-Studs Terkel, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do
340 Law:
“There are doubtless those who would wish to lock up all those who suspected of terrorist and other serious offences and, in the time-honored phrase, throw away the key. But a suspect is by definition a person whom no offence has been proved. Suspicions, even if reasonably entertained, may prove to be misplaced, as a series of tragic miscarriages of justice has demonstrated. Police officers and security officials can be wrong. It is a gross injustice to deprive of his liberty for significant periods a person who has committed no crime and does not intend to do so. No civilized country should willingly tolerate such injustices.”
― Tom Bingham, The Rule of Law
“The fundamental tension of the profession is the struggle between bold advocacy of the client's interests and the need to establish and hold to limits that prevent advocacy from leading to irrational and inequitable results; and thus the lawyer's job in practice is to be on one hand the impassioned representative of his client to the world, and on the other the wise representative to his client of the legal system, and the society, explaining and upholding the demands and restrictions which that system places on them both. ”
― Scott Turow, One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School
The architect Cass Gilbert had grand ambitions for his design of a new home for the Supreme Court. How could Gilbert convey to visitors the magnitude and importance of the judicial process taking place within the Court’s walls? The answer, he decided, was steps. Gilbert pushed back the wings of the building, so that the public face of the building would be a portico with a massive and imposing stairway. Visitors would not have to walk a long distance to enter, but few would forget the experience of mounting those forty-four steps to the double row of eight massive columns supporting the roof.
The walk up the stairs would be the central symbolic experience of the Supreme Court, a physical manifestation of the American march to justice. The stairs separated the Court from the everyday world—and especially from the earthly concerns of the politicians in the Capitol—and announced that the justices would operate, literally, on a higher plane. That, in any event, was the theory. The truth about the Court has always been more complicated.
-Jeffrey Toobin, The Nine
355 Military science
“A few words in defense of military scientists. I agree that squad leaders are in the best position to know what and how much their men and women need to bring on a given mission. But you want those squad leaders to be armed with knowledge, and not all knowledge comes from experience. Sometimes it comes from a pogue at USUHS who’s been investigating the specific and potentially deadly consequences of a bodybuilding supplement. Or an army physiologist who puts men adrift in life rafts off the dock at a Florida air base and discovers that wetting your uniform cools you enough to conserve 74 percent more of your body fluids per hour. Or the Navy researcher who comes up with a way to speed the recovery time from travelers’ diarrhea. These things matter when it’s 115 degrees and you’re trying to keep your troops from dehydrating to the point of collapse. There’s no glory in the work. No one wins a medal. And maybe someone should.”― Mary Roach, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
“Most firefights go by so fast that acts of bravery or cowardice are more or less spontaneous. Soldiers might live the rest of their lives regretting a decision that they don’t even remember making; they might receive a medal for doing something that was over before they even knew they were doing it. The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.”
― Sebastian Junger, War (2010)
“If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected .”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
364 True Crime
“Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.”― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
"I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane."
— Michelle McNamara, I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
370 Education:
And yet, while teens and young adults have absorbed digital tools into their daily lives like no other age group, while they have grown up with more knowledge and information readily at hand, taken more classes, built their own Web sites, enjoyed more libraries, bookstores, and museums in their towns and cities . . . in sum, while the world has provided them extraordinary chances to gain knowledge and improve their reading/writing skills, not to mention offering financial incentives to do so, young Americans today are no more learned or skillful than their predecessors, no more knowledgeable, fluent, up-to-date, or inquisitive, except in the materials of youth culture. They don’t know any more history or civics, economics or science, literature or current events. They read less on their own, both books and newspapers, and you would have to canvass a lot of college English instructors and employers before you found one who said that they compose better paragraphs. In fact, their technology skills fall well short of the common claim, too, especially when they must apply them to research and workplace tasks.
― Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future
I think a trillion dollars of student loans and a massive skills gap are precisely what happens to a society that actively promotes one form of education as the best course for the most people. I think the stigmas and stereotypes that keep so many people from pursuing a truly useful skill, begin with the mistaken belief that a four-year degree is somehow superior to all other forms of learning.
We are lending money we don't have to kids who can't pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist. That's nuts.
-Mike Rowe
“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
― Tara Westover, Educated
381 Commerce (Trade)
“Our urge to trade has profoundly affected the trajectory of the human species. Simply by allowing nations to concentrate on producing those things that their geographic, climatic, and intellectual endowments best enable them to do, and to exchange those goods for what is best produced elsewhere, trade has directly propelled our global prosperity.”
― William J. Bernstein, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World from Prehistory to Today
383 Postal communication
“In February 1914, the Pierstorffs of Grangeville, Idaho, sent their five-year-old daughter to visit her grandmother 75 miles away in Lewiston via parcel post, because it was cheaper than buying her a train ticket. Little May Pierstorff weighed 48 pounds, which meant that she was just under the Post Office Department’s 50-pound limit for parcels. The Grangeville postmaster charged her parents 53 cents, attaching the appropriate stamps to the front of her coat. May traveled all the way to Lewiston in a railway baggage car under the watchful eye of a railway mail clerk. When she arrived, a mail clerk on duty drove her to her grandmother’s house rather than leaving her at the post office for morning delivery. Soon there were more incidents of “child mailing,” and finally the Post Office Department outlawed the practice.”
― Devin Leonard, Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service
385 Railroad transportation
“Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all - a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.
[On British railway dining cars]”
― Simon Bradley, The Railways: Nation, Network and People
387 Water, air, Transportaion
We live in an age when travel by sea is for pleasure, so that we look forward happily to the prospect of sunlit days on a liner gliding through calm, sparkling seas while a bell melodiously calls us for yet another meal. But the abiding image of a shipside departure in the decades leading up to the First World War is of a weeping young wife, with a child clinging to her skirt, being separated from her husband who is emigrating in the hope of finding a better life for them all. The deep apprehension of those who had bravely taken the decision to emigrate was further clouded by the uncertainty of the journey, which encompassed both the unknown shipmates with whom the emigrant would be berthed and the capriciousness of the sea itself.
-Christopher Deakes, A Century of Sea Travel: Personal Accounts from the Steamship Era
“The heavens had become an immense, quivering, horizon-wide curtain of fluorescence, like God’s laundry flapping in the night sky.”
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“Air travel is a complicated, inconvenient, and often scary affair for millions of people, and at the same time it’s cloaked in secrecy. Its mysteries are concealed behind a wall of specialized jargon, corporate reticence, and an irresponsible media.”
― Patrick Smith, Cockpit Confidential
― Patrick Smith, Cockpit Confidential
388 Transportation
Despite the indignity of commuting by bicycle, I not only continue to do it, but also find it both practical and enjoyable. This is true of more and more people all over the country, and consequently many cities and towns are reworking their streets to accommodate them. In the meantime, though, the streets remain a place rife with indignity, as well as absurdity, conflict, misunderstanding, misfortune, and even death—for, as long as there are people, they will make poor decisions, and as long as there are vehicles, they will crash into each other
Some say the United States should follow the leads of bike-friendly countries such as Holland and Denmark; others say bicycles should be banned altogether. And everyone, regardless of vehicle choice, recounts his or her own personal indignities and cites examples of why all other modes of transit are evil.
-BikeSnobNYC, The Enlightened Cyclist: Commuter Angst, Dangerous Drivers, and Other Obstacles on the Path to Two-Wheeled Transcendence
IN THE SECOND HALF OF the nineteenth century, the horse-pulled streetcar, clip-clopping along at five miles per hour and filled with an unbearable stench, slowly began to cripple two great American cities. In Boston and New York, there were too many people and no safe, fast, reliable way for them to move from one neighborhood to the next. In the summer heat, carriages inched forward until the animals reared up their legs in frustration, and police had to come out swinging their clubs to restore peace. During the winter it was no better. Horses struggled to get their footing in the snow and ice and were driven to exhaustion or sometimes death. When a solution to the problem finally emerged—a subway—subway—it was rejected time and again, either by corrupt politicians, selfish businessmen, or terrified citizens. “A menace to the health of the public,” a man of the times said. A newspaper article went even further, describing a subway ride like “living in a tomb.” This is a story about fabulously wealthy Gilded Age industrialists and dirt-poor immigrants during a period when Fifth Avenue mansions and Beacon Hill brownstones stood blocks from sheet-covered shanties and rat-infested tenements. But it’s also about an age of innovation, an exhilarating time after the Civil War when the telephone, lightbulb, typewriter, cash register, dishwasher, sewing machine, electric motor, and even dynamite were born of a need to make life simpler.
-Doug Most, The Race Underground
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394 Hugs and Kisses:
But beyond the shiverin’, twitterin,’ toe-twitchin,’ sexy-feel-good of it, what do we really know about kissing? Is it truly the doorway to the soul that poets wax on about? The barometer for connubial bliss? The yin to the yang? The moth to the flame?For me, understanding the meaning of this intoxicating interaction has been my manifest destiny. I’ve long felt its gravitational pull. It’s mesmerized me, preoccupied me and shaped my perception of things.
-Andréa Demirjian , Kissing: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About One of Life's Sweetest Pleasures (2006)
If we had to be blunt and direct we could agree with Dr. Henry Gibbons that a kiss is simply “the anatomical juxtaposition of two orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction.” But who wants to be blunt and direct? The real point is, What does kissing mean? What does it do to you? How does it make you feel? To answer those questions you have to ask people who are in love or who are infatuated because they—and not dictionaries—are the true experts when it comes to defining what kissing is.
-William Cane, The Art of Kissing
The book contains plenty of practical advice on how to make yourself more huggable based on actual responses. It also examines more than twenty different types of hugs—from basic heart-to-heart and side-by-side hugs to more unusual moving hugs and group hugs and specialized forms of hugging such as holding hands—explaining how to do every hug and highlighting what men and women like and dislike about each one. The final section on hugging technique is the result of tabulating and analyzing comments from people all over the world.
-William Cane, The Art of Hugging
The phenomenon of kissing plays a very important role throughout one’s life. For a child, kissing symbolizes love and approval. It is a reward for being good and is a warm send-off to a good night’s sleep. Mom’s kisses have magical powers to make the hurt go away. Kissing can even break spells to awaken Sleeping Beauties and turn frogs into princes. So, from the start, kissing is a very pleasurable concept.
Think about kissing for a minute. It’s really a rather bizarre act. You pucker the lips that frame your mouth-a damp, ger-infested opening through which food(and who knows what else) passes- and touch another with them. Sort of sounds the same way that eating fried chicken embryos for breakfast does, doesn’t it? So where did this kissing idea originate? Why isn’t it a rubbing of bellies or a foundling of fingers? And how was it cajoled into participating?
-Tomima Edmark, The kissing book
This is a book about hugging. Hugging is an instinct, a natural response to feelings of affection, compassion, need, and joy. Hugging is also a science, a simple method of support, healing, and growth, with measurable and remarkable results. In its highest form, hugging is also an art. Techniques of hugging are described here with a cheerful mix of whimsy and seriousness. May they serve as a framework for you to create your own experience and practice as a Hug Therapist.
-Kathleen Keating, The Hug Therapy Book
Yet the behavior we recognize as kissing simply cries out for better scientific explanation. Just think: From a completely clinical perspective, microbiologists will tell you that it is a means for two people to swap mucus, bacteria, and who knows what else. Picturing all those tiny organisms swishing through our saliva isn’t just unromantic, it inspires a question: Why would this mode of transferring germs evolve? And why is it so enjoyable when the chemistry is right?
-Sheril Kirshenbaum, The Science of Kissing
394 Holidays
"You mean you're going to send the same form letter to the Great Pumpkin, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?""Why not? These guys get so much mail they can't possibly tell the difference... I bet they don't even read the letters themselves! How could they?! The trouble with you, Charlie Brown, is you don't understand how these big organizations work!"
— Charles M. Schulz (The Complete Peanuts, Vol. 6: 1961-1962)
Some nights, some places are a little brighter. It's difficult to stare at New York City on Valentine's Day, or Dublin on St. Patrick's. The old walled city of Jerusalem lights up like a candle on each of Chanukah's eight nights...We're here, the glow...will say in one and a half centuries. We're here, and we're alive."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Illuminated)
New Years January 1st
“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Chesterton calendar
National Science Fiction Day/ Mark and Kristin’s Wedding Anniversary January 2nd
Our culture has almost no place left where matters of philosophy and theology can be discussed freely in the public square. It’s out of court in politics, it does not sell beer and shampoo on television, our Chattering Classes are so ignorant of the most elementary points of both that the less said the better on almost any talk show you could name. But in the countless worlds of science fiction and fantasy, there is still limitless room for a talented Catholic writer to spin a yarn and proclaim the gospel thereby. God send more gifted apostles to this new Areopagus!
Mark Shea Science Fiction/Fantasy and the Areopagus (May 14, 2009) catholicexchange.com
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked up at the stars in the night sky and wondered, what if…
And really, I think that the larger reason why science fiction has endured for me as a lifelong passion is that it embodies the one thing that makes stories utterly compelling: the thrill, and often the fear, of the unknown. Not knowing what’s out there, how dangerous it is, how inevitable it is, is an utterly terrifying concept that is uniquely exciting.
It’s like standing outside in a particularly powerful storm and wondering just how much destructive power it will bring to bear.
Steve Skojec SciFi & The Thrill of the Unknown in Storytelling (Jul 24, 2019) steveskojec.com
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birthday 3rd Monday in Jan
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr. (A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches)
Groundhog Day February 2nd
"With a whistle of the wind,
And an icy snow flurry.
Off to Gobbler's Knob,
Come now let us hurry!
It is February second!
Groundhog's Day!
We need some prognostication,
On this cold winter's day.
Happy Groundhog Day to you!
Punxsutawney Phil, do come out of your cave!
For whether you cast a fair shadow, or no shadow you see on this day!
We send many warm wishes,
Of good tidings and cheer!
For when it is Groundhog's Day,
Springtime is surely near!"
— L.K. Merideth
President’s Day 3rd Monday in Feb
Consider, for instance, the old story about Washington’s wooden teeth. If you actually think about it, it doesn’t really make sense. Wood would be a terrible material for dentures. Moisture makes it swell and soften and split. Whatever bits of denture Washington didn’t accidentally swallow would fall out of his mouth while he was, say, leading the Continental Army or quelling conflict between Alexander Hamilton and, well, nearly anyone. His breath, moreover, would have been legendarily bad—embarrassing fodder for the gossipy Founding Fathers. So perhaps it’s not surprising that there is not a single letter or diary entry substantiating the wooden teeth. Nor are there instructional materials on wooden- tooth making in early American medical literature, or anything to suggest that Washington was a dental innovator. The wooden teeth are a myth, plain and simple. Some of us accept it, perhaps instinctually, because we haven’t been taught to think critically about Washington, our mysterious national father figure. Then again, maybe we’d simply prefer not to know the appalling truth.
Alexis Coe, You Never Forget Your First (2020)
They say I tell a great many stories; I reckon I do, but I have found in the course of a long experience that common people, take them as they run, are more easily informed through the medium of broad illustration than in any other way, and as to what the hypercritical few may think, I don’t care. —Abraham Lincoln
Gordon Leidner, Lincoln's Gift: How Humor Shaped Lincoln's Life and Legacy (2015)
Valentine’s Day February 14th
“Today's Valentine's Day. There's a whole day devoted solely to love. Does that make any sense? Nah. Love makes us all crazy. But it's fun too.”
― Lisa Greenwald, Sweet Treats & Secret Crushes
Saint Valentine was a Catholic priest from Italy in the third century. Young men who were married could avoid military conscription into the Roman army, but because there was a shortage of soldiers, they were barred from marriage until they had served in the military first. Valentine married the young men to their brides anyway and for that act of defiance he lost his head.
“In fact, if you’re ever in Rome you can go to the church of St Mary Cosmedin — that’s the one where Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck visited in Roman Holiday — and see his skull. It’s still there with flowers on it.
Fr. Dwight Longenecker, The Real St. Valentine (February 14, 2020) The Stream
Roses are red, violets are blue,
I was beaten with clubs, beheaded, buried under the cover of darkness, disinterred by my followers, and you commemorate my martyrdom by sending each other chocolates
St. Patrick’s Day March 17th
"Corned beef and cabbage and leprechaun men.
Colorful rainbows hide gold at their end.
Shamrocks and clovers with three leaves plus one.
Dress up in green—add a top hat for fun.
Steal a quick kiss from the lasses in red.
A tin whistle tune off the top of my head.
Friends, raise a goblet and offer this toast—
'The luck of the Irish and health to our host!'"
— Richelle E. Goodrich (Making Wishes)
April Fool’s Day April 1st
“April Fools' is the only day to take people seriously.”
― Criss Jami, Healology
In 1983, an intrepid AP reporter interviewed a professor at Boston University about the history of the day. The professor initially said he didn't know anything, but—after the reporter pushed for information—he told a story about the Roman Emperor Constantine and his court jesters.
According to the professor, Constantine was told by his court jesters that they would make better rulers than him, and rather than immediately feeding everyone to the lions, Constantine allowed his jesters to rule for a day. The King of the Fools, someone named Kugel, made a proclamation that “only the absurd would be allowed on that day,” and April Fools' Day was born.
Mystery solved, right? Wrong. Unfortunately for the reporter, it turned out the professor was having a bit of fun. A little over two weeks after the article appeared, the professor admitted he had invented Kugel. “I made up the story because it comported with April Fools’ Day," the professor said, "and I don’t know what all the hullabaloo is about.”
Austin Thompson The Hazy Origins of April Fools' Day (March 6, 2020) Mental Floss
Easter
"Two thousand years ago Jesus is crucified, three days later he walks out of a cave and they celebrate with chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps and beautifully decorated eggs. I guess these were things Jesus loved as a child."
— Billy Crystal (Still Foolin' 'Em: Where I've Been, Where I'm Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys)
"Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday."
— Fulton J. Sheen
Mother’s Day 2nd Sunday in May
“Sweater, n. Garment worn by child when its mother is feeling chilly.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
“Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we've ever met.”
― Marguerite Duras
“My mother does not own my hands, though she works hard to train them.
My mother does not own my eyes, though she frequently directs their focus.
My mother does not own my mind, though she yields great influence upon it.
My heart, however, she owns completely, for it was hers the day I was born.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Slaying Dragons
Memorial Day last Monday in May
"The United States and the freedom for which it stands, the freedom for which they died, must endure and prosper. Their lives remind us that freedom is not bought cheaply. It has a cost; it imposes a burden. And just as they whom we commemorate were willing to sacrifice, so too must we -- in a less final, less heroic way -- be willing to give of ourselves."
President Ronald Regan, Arlington National Cemetery May 31,1982
National Cheese Day June 4th
Being a cheesemonger has brought me many tremendous experiences. My crowning local achievement was being chosen to be a judge at this macaroni and cheese cook-off. I expected to taste a lot of experimental dishes. Would there be a PBR-infused mac and cheese? Mac and cheese with grassfed beef formed into faux Vienna sausages? Locally sourced, artisanal, gluten-free, cruelty-free, ancient grain pasta topped with locally sourced, artisanal, gluten-free, cruelty-free, grassfed, rBGH-free, raw milk cheese? While I would often prefer a traditional version at home, I couldn’t wait to see what the contestants would come up with.
Gordon Edgar, Cheddar (2015)
Father’s Day 2nd Sunday in June
“I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.”
― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
“The heart of a father is the masterpiece of nature.”
― Prevost Abbe, Manon Lescaut
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
— (Probably NOT) Mark Twain
Independence Day Fourth of July
“You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.”
― Erma Bombeck
National Hot Dog Day July 15th
Nathan Handwerker was my grandfather. He founded Nathan’s Famous in 1916. With his wife, my grandmother Ida, he worked hard to build it into one of the most popular restaurants in the world. During the heyday of the early 1950s, the business grossed $3 million annually. In the sixties, Jackie Kennedy ate in the restaurant’s tiny dining room. Both Barbra Streisand and Frank Sinatra ordered Nathan’s Famous frankfurters flown over when they were performing in London. But the place was never about celebrities. It was democratic through and through. When I was a child, I would visit my grandfather at the original Coney Island restaurant. I remember following him through the busy back kitchens, feeling self-conscious that the workers were pointing me out as the grandson of the founder. Back then, I had only a general idea that the place was cherished by a lot of New Yorkers and visited by people from all over America and the world.
Lloyd Handwerker, Famous Nathan (2016)
Friendship Day 1st Sunday in August
Friendship is born at that moment when one man says to another: "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself "
C. S. Lewis “The Four Loves”
I have discovered that friendship is the springboard to every other love. Friendships spill over onto the other important relationships of life. People with no friends usually have a diminished capacity for sustaining any kind of love. They tend to go through a succession of marriages, be estranged from various family members, and have trouble getting along at work. On the other hand, those who learn how to love their friends tend to make long and fulfilling marriages, work well on business teams, and enjoy their children.
Alan Loy Mcginnis, Friendship Factor (2003)
Labor Day 1st Monday in Sep
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.
~ Albert Einstein
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, some done,
Has earned a night’s repose.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Columbus Day 2nd Monday in Oct
"Columbus's real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer. It would be hard to name any figure in history who has achieved more lasting fame with less competence. He spent large parts of eight years bouncing around Caribbean islands and coastal South America convinced that he was in the heart of the Orient and that Japan and China were at the edge of every sunset. He never worked out that Cuba is an island and never once set foot on, or even suspected the existence of, the landmass to the north that everyone thinks he discovered: the United States."
— Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
"Advice to explorers everywhere: if you would like to recieve due credit for your discoveries, keep a detailed account of your journeys as Columbus did. On Septemeber 28, 1492, after four weeks at sea, he writes: Dear diary...I means journal. Yes, dear journal. That's what I meant to say. Whew. Anyway, we have yet to discover America, and the crew has become increasingly rebellious. I have decided to turn back if we have not spotted it by Columbus Day. Will write again later if not killed by crew. P.S. Last night's buffet was fabulous, the ice sculptures magnificent."
— Cuthbert Soup (Another Whole Nother Story)
Halloween October 31st
Halloween is undoubtedly the most misunderstood of festivals. Virtually every English-speaker in the world can instantly tell you where the name ‘Christmas’ comes from – they could probably also provide an anecdote about St Patrick and his Day, and of course those celebrations with simple declarative titles, like New Year’s or Father’s Day, require no great linguistic skills – but amazingly few understand so much as the origin of the name ‘Halloween’. The word itself almost has a strange, pagan feel – which is ironic, since the name derives from ‘All Hallows’ Eve’. Prior to about AD 1500, the noun ‘hallow’ (derived from the Old English hálga, meaning ‘holy’) commonly referred to a holy personage or, specifically, a saint.6 All Saints’ Day was the original name for the Catholic celebration held on 1 November, but – long after ‘hallow’ had lost its meaning as a noun – the eve of that day would become known as Halloween.
-Lisa Morton, Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween
So the first time you hear the concept of Halloween, when you're a kid, remember the first time you even
heard about it, it's like... your brain can't even... "what is this ?!
Who's giving out candy, someone's giving out candy ?!
Who is giving out this candy ?!
Everyone that we know is just giving out candy ?!!!
I gotta be a part of this, take me with you, I wanna do it, I'll do anything that they want...!
I can wear that ! I'll wear anything that I have to wear. I'll do anything I have to do. I will get the candy from these fools !
That are so stupidly giving it away".
-Jerry Seinfeld, Halloween, I'm Telling You for the Last Time
Veterans Day—Nov 11th
“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated [this ground], far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”
- President Abraham Lincoln, 1863, in the Gettysburg Address.
“I saw your sons and your husbands, your brothers and your sweethearts. I saw how they worked, played, fought, and lived. I saw some of them die. I saw more courage, more good humor in the face of discomfort, more love in an era of hate, and more devotion to duty than could exist under tyranny.”
- Comedian Bob Hope, 1944, in “I Never Left Home,” his book about going on tour to entertain the troops, which he did in every U.S. conflict from World War II to the Persian Gulf War.
Thanksgiving 4th Thursday in Nov
We might say that the Pilgrims celebrated the “First American Thanksgiving,” but there is abundant evidence that Native American peoples had thanksgiving celebrations as well. The Algonquian people, for example, participated in regular ceremonies linked to the crop cycle. A more accurate expression, then, would be the “First American Christian Thanksgiving,” but this wordier title is still off the mark. Spanish documents refer to a thanksgiving mass celebrated shortly after conquistadors landed at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565—at a time when only two of the Pilgrims had even been born. Similarly, Texas historians insist that Spanish colonists celebrated thanksgiving with the Manso Indians near present-day El Paso in 1598, not early enough to beat out Florida but still a generation before the celebration in Massachusetts. So I guess we could call the Pilgrims’ celebration the “First American Protestant Christian Thanksgiving,” but even this mouthful would be imprecise.
Robert Tracy McKenzie, The First Thanksgiving (2013) InterVarsity Press
Chanukah
"Chanukah is one of the best known and perhaps most celebrated holidays of the year. it is a festive, family-oriented holiday that comes in an appropriate season: when the days have become the shortest and the desire to connect with family and friends is greatest. The Chanukah story and symbolism of 'kindling lights within darkness' is spiritually rooted within the context of the season in which it occurs."
— DovBer Pinson (Eight Lights: 8 Meditations for Chanukah)
Christmas
While we consider ‘our’ Christmas customs to be the true ones, we – most people in the West today who celebrate Christmas – in reality don’t adhere to ‘our’ customs, but to an amalgam of traditions drawn primarily from the Anglo-American world and the German-speaking lands. These were then shaken up, mixed together with a couple of centuries of newspapers, magazines and books, not to mention a hundred years of radio, film and television, to end up not with one culture’s Christmas, but with something entirely new, a holiday that is recognized across the globe, but comes from nowhere in particular.Judith Flanders, (2017). Christmas: A Biography
It was actually illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681 (the fine was five shillings).
As early as 1621, just one year after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, their governor, William Bradford, found some of the colony’s new residents trying to take the day off. Bradford ordered them right back to work. And in 1659 the Massachusetts General Court did in fact declare the celebration of Christmas to be a criminal offense.
-Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas
I’ve never seen the inside of a mine shaft, and thank God I never will. But the groan of the Cape Breton coal mines echoed though the years even so, in part because one of the few possessions my grandfather took with him when he travelled west was a bit of family lore, one nurtured in those very coal mines.
Who do children wait for on Christmas Eve? Father Christmas. And how does he enter homes? Down though chimneys and up though stove popes and although he’s always
Depicted as wearing velvet red, spotlessly clean, his travels would have marked him. Travels always do. And as any person-a miner, say-who’s dealt with coal knows, if you spend your time crawling through chimney’s, you’re going toget covered in soot. It gets inside your lungs and grits your eyes, streaks white beards with grey and turns grey beards black. And so it was with Fathr Christmas. When he tiptoed through houses, late at night, covered in soot, he would stop to kiss the children on the forehead while they lay sleeping, and when they woke on Christmas morning… coal dust kisses.
395 Etiquette (Manners)
Although today’s manners are more situational, tailored to particular circumstances and the expectations of those around us, they remain a combination of common sense, generosity of spirit, and a few specific “rules” that help us interact thoughtfully. And as fluid as manners are (and always have been), they rest on the same bedrock principles: respect, consideration, and honesty.
Etiquette is a code of behavior for people from all walks of life, every socioeconomic group, and of all ages. No one is immune to having his life enhanced by good manners. This ever-adaptive code of behavior also allows us to be flexible enough to respect those whose beliefs and traditions differ from our own. Civility and courtesy (in essence, the outward expressions of human decency) are the proverbial glue that holds society together—qualities that are more important than ever in today’s complex and changing world.
-Peggy Post, Emily Post's Etiquette 17th Edition
If each of us lived in a protective glass bubble, never encroached on anyone else’s living space, and never interacted with another soul, there would be no need for manners. We could simply do as we pleased, go about our business, and it wouldn’t matter to anyone else. But since Homo sapiens is gregarious and likes to establish and live in communities, and even in more intimate settings such as houses or apartments, rules of conduct are imperative. The starting point for all rules is the need to treat others with as much kindness and courtesy as you would like them to treat you with. That means keeping your more self-centered instincts in check. The best way to do this, especially in a family with school-age children, is to establish some guidelines for living together.
-Nancy Tuckerman, The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette
A lady’s telephone conversations, whether business or private, are still personal. She knows that others in her immediate vicinity do not want to hear her close a deal or recount the details of a television show. A lady knows that other people are no more interested in hearing her private conversations than she is in hearing theirs.
-Candace Simpson-Giles, How to Be a Lady Revised and Expanded (The GentleManners Series)
A gentleman understands that, for good or ill, as he walks down a sidewalk while engaged in a conversation via his wireless headset, passersby may understandably take him for a paranoid schizophrenic.
-John Bridges, How to Be a Gentleman
398 Folklore
I've been reading books of oldThe legends and the myths
-Coldplay and Chainsmokers
After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.
-J. R. R. Tolkien
Fables:
“Fables in sooth are not what they appear;
Our moralists are mice, and such small deer.
We yawn at sermons, but we gladly turn
To moral tales, and so amused we learn.”
- Dr Johnson ,1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, Volume 10
If you read the fables, 'Beowulf,' for example, you will know something about the person who writes them, and I like that. Secondly, they will not be about individuals; they will be about community. Thirdly, they're all about moralizing. Fourthly, the way they express themselves takes its tone from the oral tradition.
-Jim Crace
AN ASTRONOMER used to go out at night to observe the stars. One evening, as he wandered through the suburbs with his whole attention fixed on the sky, he fell accidentally into a deep well. While he lamented and bewailed his sores and bruises, and cried loudly for help, a neighbor ran to the well, and learning what had happened said: "Hark ye, old fellow, why, in striving to pry into what is in heaven, do you not manage to see what is on earth?"
— Aesop (Aesop's Fables)
Folktales/Tall Tales:
The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.
-Joseph Campbell
“For most of human history, 'literature,' both fiction and poetry, has been narrated, not written — heard, not read. So fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world.”
― Angela Carter
Things, very strange things, happen in folktales and there is never much attention given to the whys and wherefores.
-Marisa Silver
TALL TALK, OR EXAGGERATED storytelling, began in the 1800s as a way for Americans to come to terms with the vast and inhospitable lands they’d come to inhabit—thick, dark forests filled with bears and panthers; treeless, arid deserts and plains; towering mountains; and uncharted seacoasts. The heroes and heroines of the tales were like the land itself—gigantic, extravagant, restless, and flamboyant. Their exaggerated feats of courage and endurance helped the backwoodsman face the overwhelming task of developing such a land.
-Mary Pope Osborne, American Tall Tales
For many years there have come drifting out of the timber country strange tales of a giant logger and inventor, Paul Bunyan by name. He is said to have been the inventor of logging. When he was a man grown, somewhere he found Babe, the Mighty Blue Ox, who was his constant companion.
-Glen Rounds, Ol' Paul, the Mighty Logger
Before Brian knew he had the bow and the fiddle in his hand and he played away and they danced away, and they all said that they had never heard any fiddler playing a tune on a fiddle better than Brian Ó Braonacháin from Barr an Ghaoith. The big man who was in the company stood up and said that the dancing must stop now. “A couple of us must go for the priest, so that we can say Mass,” said he, “for this corpse must go out of here before daybreak.” “Oh,” said the girl with the curly dark hair, “there is no need to go for any priest tonight, the best priest in Ireland is sitting here beside me on the chair, Brian Ó Braonachain from Barr an Ghaoith.” “Oh, I have nothing of a priest’s power or holiness,” said Brian, “and I do not know anything about a priest’s work in any way.” “Come, come,” said she, “you will do that just as well as you did the rest.” Before Brian knew he was standing at the altar with two clerks and with the vestments on him.
-Jane Yolen, Favorite Folktales from Around the World
Legends: “History has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.”
― Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three
Then Merlin said, “Arthur, shall become the greatest and most famous King that ever lived in Britain; and I do foresee that many knights of extraordinary excellence shall gather about thee and that men shall tell of their marvelous deeds as long as this land shall continue, and I do foresee that through these knights thy reign shall be full of splendor and glory; and I do foresee that the most marvelous adventure of the Holy Grail shall be achieved by three of the knights of thy Court, and that to thy lasting renown, who shall be the King under whose reign the holy cup shall be achieved.”
― Howard Pyle, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights
In merry England in the time of old, when good King Henry the Second ruled the land, there lived within the green glades of Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham Town, a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood. No archer ever lived that could speed a gray goose shaft with such skill and cunning as his, nor were there ever such yeomen as the sevenscore merry men that roamed with him through the greenwood shades. Right merrily they dwelled within the depths of Sherwood Forest, suffering neither care nor want, but passing the time in merry games of archery or bouts of cudgel play, living upon the King's venison, washed down with draughts of ale of October brewing.
Not only Robin himself but all the band were outlaws and dwelled apart from other men, yet they were beloved by the country people round about, for no one ever came to jolly Robin for help in time of need and went away again with an empty fist.
And now I will tell how it came about that Robin Hood fell afoul of the law.
― Howard Pyle, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood
Myth: “Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.”
― Joseph Campbell
“The early Greek mythologists transformed a world full of fear into a world full of beauty.”
― Edith Hamilton, Mythology
“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
“THAT Perseus always won. That's why my mom had named me after him, even if he was son of Zeus and I was son of Poseidon. The original Perseus was one of the only heroes in the Greek myths who got a happy ending. The others died-betrayed, mauled, mutilated, poisoned, or cursed by the gods. My mom hoped I would inherit Perseus's luck. Judging by how my life was going so far, I wasn't too optimistic.”
― Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters
“Nico had once read a story from Plato, who claimed that in the ancient times, all humans had been a combination of male and female. Each person had two heads, four arms, four legs. Supposedly, these combo-humans had been so powerful they made the gods uneasy, so Zeus split them in half—man and woman. Ever since, humans had felt incomplete. They spent their lives searching for their other halves.”
― Rick Riordan, The Blood of Olympus
Parables: A parable is a form of writing that tells a story about common everyday things within the range of every individual's experience, and at the same time draws a subtle analogy between the ordinary facts of the story and the deeper meaning which lies parallel to the facts. Literally, the word parable means, "a comparison.
-Ervin Seale (1966) Learn to Live. p. 16
Jesus of Nazareth could have chosen simply to express Himself in moral precepts; but like a great poet He chose the form of the parable, wonderful short stories that entertained and clothed the moral precept in an eternal form. It is not sufficient to catch man's mind, you must also catch the imaginative faculties of his mind.
-Dudley Nichols, Film and/as literature, p. 238
The Parable of the Good Samaritan
And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read?” And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”
But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. Now by chance a priest was going down that road; and when he saw him he passed by on the other side. So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And the next day he took out two denarii[a] and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.’ Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
-Luke 10:25-37 Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSVCE)
399 Customs of war & diplomacy
“One of Ronald Reagan’s fantasies as president was that he would take Mikhail Gorbachev on a tour of the United States so the Soviet leader could see how ordinary Americans lived. Reagan often talked about it. He imagined that he and Gorbachev would fly by helicopter over a working-class community, viewing a factory and its parking lot filled with cars and then circling over the pleasant neighborhood where the factory workers lived in homes “with lawns and backyards, perhaps with a second car or a boat in the driveway, not the concrete rabbit warrens I’d seen in Moscow.” The helicopter would descend, and Reagan would invite Gorbachev to knock on doors and ask the residents “what they think of our system.” The workers would tell him how wonderful it was to live in America.”
― Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy
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