waiting

"God's waiting and man's," wrote the nineteenth-century British minister Alexander MacLaren, in a reflection on Isaiah 30:18.  How "bold and beautiful, that He and we should be represented as sharing the same attitude."  Here, then, is something of the mystery of incarnation: God's being like us is not limited to God's taking on feet and hands and hair.  God is like us in this posture of pause and expectancy and anticipation and longing and wondering where we are.  And so Advent is not only about our waiting for God, waiting for God to get born, waiting for God to come back.  It is also a time when we enter God's waiting, God's divine waiting.  And perhaps that is where the meaning of waiting gleams the most brightly of all.

--Lauren F. Winner, in the forward for The Meaning is in the Waiting, by Paula Gooder

writing

"Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cute out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world."

-- Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

because

"I write because I don't know what I think until I read what I say."

- Flannery O'Connor

(One of my sisters posted this quote here in January.)

carry a book

“Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.” 

― Stephen King

two motives

“There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”

― Bertrand Russell

in the bookstore

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” 

― Henry Ward Beecher

common, everyday blessings

via MamaDweeb

(Laura Ingalls Wilder)