Random Samplings from Random Books

"...and little Dagonet mincing with his feet:
"Knight, an ye fling those rubies round my neck
In lieu of hers, I'll hold thou hast some touch
Of music, since I care not for thy pearls.
Swine? I have wallow'd, I have wash'd- the world
In flesh and shadow- I have had my day.
The dirty nurse, Experience, in her kind
Hath foul'd me- and I wallow'd, then I wash'd-
I have my day and my philosophies-
And thank the Lord I am King Arthurs's fool.
Swine, say ye? swine, goats, asses, rams and geese
Troop's round a Paynim harper once, who thrumm'd
On such a wire as musically as thou
Some such fine song- but never a king's fool."
Alfred Lord Tennyson
from Idylls of the King, p. 214
$2

"...Yet mountains and lakes as playgrounds are not enough, no matter how well supervised. A Lake District National Park can be no mere conservation area, still less any kind of static or even working museum. Not all the cash flowing in from the tourists, not the standards so well maintained by The National Trust, which owns key parts of the park, can amount to much if a genuine organic life doesn't pulse in beneath the well-cared-for skin. The region, as far as I could tell, seemed to be surviving. Alive, if precariously. Which of us can say more?"
Norman Shrapnel
Nature's Wonderlands- National Parks of the World
$12



"English majors in college show up in my writing workshops years later, after trying a career in another field, because a dream was born in them back in school when they read Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann and Virginia Wolf, and they can't get it out of their heads. So after a few years as computer programmers, they see it doesn't give them that kind of hard rain in the afternoon outside the window. They know there is something else and that it's in their own brain. I honor English majors. It's a dumb thing to major in. It leads nowhere. It's good to be dumb, it allows us to love something for no reason. That's the best kind of love."
Natalie Goldberg
Wild Mind - Living the Writer's Life, p. 140