Quote from my reading: Legislation

OW Holmes: “The fact is…that legislation…is empirical. It is necessarily made a means by which a body, having the power, puts burdens which are disagreeable to them on the shoulders of someone else.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 246.

Quote from my reading: Self-love.

Dr. Holmes: “Self-love…is a cup without any bottom.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 243.

Quote from my reading: Originality

“In plain words he must face the loneliness of original work. No one can cut new paths in company. He does that alone.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 231.

Quote from my reading: Ideas.

Fanny Dixwell to Uncle John Holmes: “Has your nephew[Oliver Wendell Holmes], all his life, professed to care more for ideas than he cares for people?”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 225.

Quote from my reading: The Novel and Empathy

“This respect for others, empathy, lies at the heart of the novel.”

Azar Nafisi. Quoted in Theresa A. Kushaga. College English (May 2008), p. 507.

Quote from My Reading: Ideas.

“Holmes was struck anew with the awful power of ideas to change the world.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 217.

Quote from My Reading: Government.

“Wendell Holmes was never to believe wholeheartedly in the power of legislation to change men’s lives.”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 211.

Quote from My Reading: Pioneers.

“What pioneer ever had chart and a lighthouse to steer by?”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 199.

Quote from My Reading: Education.

“But when you had mastered the subjects they [the teachers] presented, where did it lead?”

Yankee from Olympus, Catherine Drinker Bowen, p. 197.

Quote from My Reading: Night Thoughts

“I was overwhelmed in melancholy; human life was so short it seemed meaningless. It’s the kind of thought you have, usually, only in the deep middle of the night waking up alone in the world.”

Jack Finney, Time and Again (Novel), p. 290.

Quote from My Reading: Impulse.

“I assume most people are tempted—at least the impulse stirs—to occasionally commit the outlandishly impossible: to whistle in church, to say something wildly inappropriate to a situation. It popped up in my mind to yell ‘Boo!’ ”

Jack Finney, Time and Again (Novel), p. 290.

Quote from My Reading: Love.

“It was hard for me to believe it was love, but who ever knows about that, or even what the word means to anyone else.”

Jack Finney, Time and Again (Novel), p. 278.

Quote from My Reading: Time and Again (Novel)

“I was finally going to know what the note in the blue envelope meant. ‘…the destruction by fire of the entire World….' The words were senseless, they didn’t mean anything, only they did: On a day far in the future Andrew Carmody would put a bullet through his head because of them.”

Jack Finney, Time and Again (Novel), 256.

Quote: War and Personality

“Or, perhaps like life itself, war merely makes cynics of cynics—and saints of saints.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 181.

Quote from My Reading: War.

“…Holmes recalled the first time he had tried to use his saber. Down at Edwards Ferry, he had been sent on horseback to carry dispatches. On the road he met a Rebel captain. They tried to get their sabers out. Both got thoroughly tangled up, wheeled, drew their pistols, rode close and pressed the muzzle to the other’s side. Neither pistol went off. No one but a soldier would understand that story.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 180.

Quote from My Reading: Lincoln.

“ ‘Get down, you fool!’ a young voice shouted. Automatically the President [Lincoln] stepped back. It was Wendell Holmes, angry and terrified…. ‘Captain,” he [Lincoln] said, ‘I am glad you know how to talk to a civilian.’ ”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 178.

Quote from My Reading: Personality Types.

“The surgeon…had told him men were divided into two kinds—external men and internal men. Internal men considered ideas more interesting than things…. The opposite, those robust creatures who acted and did not need to think…filled with health and a kind of blessed immediacy, a capacity for living in the present and the present only.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 164.

Quote from My Reading: War.

Wendell Holmes: “War?....War is organized bore.”

Yankee from Olympus. Catherine Drinker Bowen. p. 163.

Quote from My Reading: America

“It is not our military might or our higher standard of living that has most distinguished us from our adversaries. It is our belief that the state is the servant of the citizen and not its master.”

Eds. Bill Adler and Tom Folsom, The Uncommon Wisdom of JFK, p. 173. .