“It is no exaggeration to say that reading has shaped our civilization more than almost any other factor and that a major impetus to reading has been the Bible” (Gene Edward Veith, Reading Between the Lines, p. 19).
How Do You Solve a Rose?
“Take a rose. How will you proceed to solve a rose? You can cultivate roses, smell them, gather and wear them, make them into perfume or potpourri, paint them or write poetry about them; these are all creative activities. But can you solve roses? Has that expression any meaning?” (Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the …
The Demand for Originality
“The demand for ‘originality’—with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work—is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare’s time ” (Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p. 121).
Back to Lateral Metaphors
“Our minds are not infinite; and as the volume of the world’s knowledge increases, we tend more and more to confine ourselves, each to his special sphere of interest and to the specialized metaphor belonging to it. The analytic bias of the last three centuries has immensely encouraged this tendency, and it is now very …
A Series of Metaphors
“The fact is, that all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things” (Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p. 23).
Why We Shouldn’t Worship Smoke
“That is the fact; whether we like it or not, the universe is made that way. This commandment [against idolatry] is interesting because it specifically puts forward the moral law as the basis of the moral code: because God has made the world like this and will not alter it, therefore you must not worship …
Deep Structure
“The Christian affirmation is, however, that the Trinitarian structure which can be shown to exist in the mind of man and in all his works is, in fact, the integral structure of the universe, and corresponds, not by pictorial imagery but by a necessary uniformity of substance, which the nature of God, in Whom all …
The Artistic Temperament
“The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs . . . But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, the very great artists are able to be ordinary men—men like Shakespeare or Browning. There are many real tragedies of …
Getting It Backwards
“Yet there is still a vast amount of talk about the isolated and uncommunicable spirit of the man of genius; about how he has in him things too deep for expression and too subtle to be subject to general criticism. I say that that is exactly what is not true of the artist. That is …
Unworthy of a Weed
“But in substance what I said about the dandelion is exactly what I should say about the sunflower or the sun, or the glory which (as the poet said) is brighter than the sun. The only way to enjoy even a weed is to feel unworthy even of a weed” (G.K. Chesterton as quoted in …