The Sequoia Farm

And yet so far away...

A few quotes from recent reading on the subject of falling short:

"There will always be a gap between who we are and who we want to be." — Todd Pickett

"We have met the enemy, and they are partly right." — Tony Campolo

"That we act different in private than in public is everyone's most conspicuous experience, it is the very ground of the life of the individual. Yet curiously this obvious fact remains unconscious, unacknowledged [...]" — Milan Kundera

"Sin is not the worse thing in the world. The worse thing in the world is the denial of sin." — Fulton Sheen

DC area in a sentence

"The place always makes me feel 15 minutes late, even when I'm early."

— Mike Rowe, on Washington, D.C.

Quote Pack

An assorted bunch of quotes I've come across in the last week:

"The safest way to make laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law."

— Frédéric Bastiat

"Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed."

— Richard John Neuhaus

"Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it."

— Philip K. Dick

"[W]hen the officials trusted to execute law faithfully violate laws regularly, they lose their presumption of legitimacy."

— Andrew McCarthy

"Consequences that are not sufficiently painful or sufficiently scary aren’t consequences[.]"

— Jonah Goldberg

"A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."

— usually attributed to Lee Segal (Segal's Law)

Quote Grab Bag

"When people lose sight of the proper objects of religious passion, they do not necessarily lose their religious instincts. Many will fill that hole in their soul with things of this world."

— Jonah Goldberg

[On Postmodernism:] "We should not be surprised at your inability to stand if your argument is that you have no legs."

— Douglas Wilson

"In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience."

— Oscar Wilde

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

— George Orwell

Is it not a little one?

"Nonsense tolerated anywhere will metastasize, and the results are always ugly. 'When the people have got used to unreason they can no longer be startled at injustice.'"

— Douglas Wilson (that last bit from Chesterton)

Temblor

This word has bothered me for years. It seems like every reporter writing up an earthquake feels compelled to use it, even though no one else in the world (for the most part) ever does. I always chalked it up to news editors and their seemingly insanely over-the-top desire for "snappy" writing. Finally, someone has run the numbers:

"A quick search on Mark Davies’ Corpus of Contemporary American English shows that temblor occurs just over twice as often in newspaper writing as in magazine writing, and more than three times as frequently in newspaper writing as in fiction."

Full article...

Walking across Lake Erie

One guy's account of walking across Lake Erie in the winter (which is apparently a thing some people do):

"A half mile north of the island, I passed a cluster of ice fishing shacks which could probably have incorporated as a city. Snowmobile tracks were everywhere, and I could make out a few old cars sitting by themselves out on the ice, perhaps waiting for a watery spring burial. A jeep with four people in it pulled up alongside me, and the driver asked me if I'd seen Fred. 'I don't even know Fred,' I said, and off he drove."

Full article ...