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In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. Those who submit - as the majority does - are conditioned to a life lived without their human birthright: work done with the joy and creativity of love. But what are schools for if not to make children fall so deeply in love with the world that they really want to learn about it? That is the true business of schools. And if they succeed in it, all other desirable developments follow of themselves. In a proper school, no fact would ever be presented as a soulless one, for the simple reason that there is no such thing. Every facet of reality, discovered where it lives, startles with its wonder, beauty, meaning. ↗
Believe me, young lady, when I tell you that there is no place for you in his world of ghosts and nightmares — no place for your fresh beauty or your unmarred dreams, no place for your wonderful hope. He can bring you nothing, because he has lost everything. Don’t try to keep him, to tie him down, because if you succeed, if he weakens, he will hate you for it. Let him be. He is not unhappy; he is resigned. He has surrendered and acquired at a high cost a deep understanding of life. ↗
I’m going to lose weight for you,” she [Valencia Merble] said. “What?” “I’m going to go on a diet. I’m going to become beautiful for you.” “I like you just the way you are.” “Do you really?” “Really,” said Billy Pilgrim. He had already seen a lot of their marriage, thanks to time-travel, and knew that it was going to be at least bearable all the way. ↗
Sometimes, as a great treat, I was allowed to remove Nursie's snowy ruffled cap. Without it, she somehow retreated into private life and lost her official status. Then, with elaborate care, I would tie a large blue satin ribbon round her head - with enormous difficulty and holding my breath, because tying a bow is no easy matter for a four-year-old. After which I would step back and exclaim in ecstasy: "Oh Nursie, you ARE beautiful!" At which she would smile and say in her gentle voice: "Am I, love? ↗
I walked slowly on, without envying my companions on horseback: for I could sit down upon an inviting spot, climb to the edge of a precipice, or trace a torrent by its sound. I descended at length into the Rheinthal, or Valley of the Rhine; the mountains of Tyrol, which yielded neither in height or in cragginess to those of Appenzel, rising before me. And here I found a remarkable difference: for although the ascending and descending was a work of some labor; yet the variety of the scenes had given me spirits, and I was not sensible of the least fatigue. But in the plain, notwithstanding the scenery was still beautiful and picturesque, I saw at once the whole way stretching before me, and had no room for fresh expectations: I was not therefore displeased when I arrived at Oberried, after a walk of about twelve miles, my coat flung upon my shoulder like a peripatetic by profession. -William Coxe ↗
The edge of something mostly buried in the sand caught the sun, and I bent to pick up a pearl nautilus. Simple and uncomplicatedly lovely, a pearl nautilus whispered its beauty. It wasn’t showy like a cameo or frog shell, with their twists and nubs and variations. It never competed for attention, but it held and reflected a prism of light that perfectly complimented its surroundings. Someone else may have overlooked a pearl nautilus, but I preferred it. - Nicole Abbot (Whisper of Light) ↗
And as we stood there, a curious thing happened: a kind of window opened in the rain, just as if a cloud had been hitched aside like a curtain, and in the space between we saw a landscape that took our breath away. The high ground along which the road ran fell away through a black, woody belt, and beyond it, for more miles than you can imagine, lay the whole basin of the Black Country, clear, amazingly clear, with innumerable smokestacks rising out of it like the merchant shipping of the world laid up in an estuary at low tide, each chimney flying a great pennant of smoke that blew away eastward by the wind, and the whole scene bleared by the light of a sulphurous sunset. No one need ever tell me again that the Black Country isn't beautiful. In all Shrophire and Radnor we'd seen nothing to touch it for vastness and savagery. And then this apocalyptic light! It was like a landscape of the end of the world, and, curiously enough, though men had built the chimneys and fired the furnaces that fed the smoke, you felt that the magnificence of the scene owed nothing to them. Its beauty was singularly inhuman and its terror – for it was terrible, you know – elemental. It made me wonder why you people who were born and bred there ever write about anything else. ↗
At first, they joked about it but as they became more detoxed and more assertive from therapy, paid ironically by the husbands, they began to realize that they each had unique strengths and powers and a burning desire for revenge. Between the Three Wise Women they had an IT expert, an actress and a supermodel, all very wealthy and beautiful. All the three men’s’ brains appeared to reside in their pants and they wondered if they set a honey trap could it possibly work. A plan was proposed by Felicity and she called it Operation Devastation. Angelina would hack into their MIS computer systems, bug their telephones, offices, cars and homes. Ava would seduce Ryan, who owned Novels and the computer firm, Angelina’s husband in a honey trap and get it all on DVD for the divorce court. Then Ava would seduce Felicity’s husband, James, the Irish footballer. Finally, Sean who was Felicity’s friend who was an out of work actor would seduce Patrick ↗
…”The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don’t suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse’s. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn’t we?” He appealed to Lucy. “There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine’s great stories. ‘My dear sister loves flowers,’ it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue — vases and jugs — and the story ends with ‘So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.’ It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets.”… ↗
Their management and regulation of our lives spans the total spectrum of American experience, from their obtuse Imperial Measurement System, to their irregularity-strangled English language. From their lobbyist-ruled government bureaucracy, to their consumer-oriented religious holidays like Christmas. From their brainless professional sports jocks cast as heroes, to their anorexic supermodels warping the concept of beauty. These are the people who made sugary colas more important that water; fast food more important than health; television sitcoms more important than reading literature. They made smoking a joint in your home a crime; going out in public without your hair tinted an embarrassment; and accidentally carrying a half-filled bottle of baby formula on an airplane a terrorist act. Do you realize 85 percent of Americans still say 'God bless you' after someone sneezes? And that 'In God We Trust' is on every single dollar in circulation? Or that 'One nation under God' is recited everyday in the Pledge of Allegiance by millions of impressionable kids? ↗
