Take a lucky dip in this refreshing pool of posts, randomly selected like literary Russian roulette (but more fun and much safer). Or filter by category to take a deeper dive into specific themes.  Enjoy!
Zeus dispenses with practicalities
Zeus here neatly rebuffs his daughter Athene's requests. I like his suitably arch reaction, which puts all supplicants in their petty place, even gorgeous goddesses, allowing the god of gods...
Scobie and the sea
This quote has haunted me since I first read Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet about thirty years ago. It is still on my wall in calligraphy. Scobie was a wonderful character.
‘Clea once asked...
Play more, work better
Of course, playing more with a view to working better isn’t going about it in the right spirit. But play more, yes, and incidentally you’ll probably work better. You won’t...
Wonder-working juice
A Greek myth concerning a wonder-working juice which confers immortality. However, when asking that Tithonus be granted eternal life they forgot to mention eternal youth, which meant he suffered eternal...
Of signs, sympathies and presentiments
Still unravelling the mystery on this one, and enjoy the playfulness and acuity with which we appear to 'pick up' signals when in fact we may be intuitively choosing to...
Half-blown rose
Something touching about the 'half-blown', that moment in a rose's beauty when it is heavy with the weight of its own blooming. Too early here to see any roses in...
Journal of joy
A delightful definition of journals, by one of history's most assiduous journal writers. A quote to share at the start of a new year, when our resolutions are new-minted and...
Writing on wheels
Another in a series of accounts by John Steinbeck's wife, Elaine, of his perpetual search for the perfect writing space. This bright idea came of his frustration at one point...
Weaving a stanza
Thoreau likens a fisherman's weaving of a creel to creating a poem about the spring. He shows great respect for skills and care in material things and processes.
'He was...
A bulwark against brain-washing
Listening time: under 9 minutes.  Sadly, some things in the state of the world are driving me to spend more time thinking about how simple citizens can remain resistent to...
Vigorous and well-preserved
A surprising way to describe an old man's forehead, having the roundness and roughness of an oyster shell. Or might it be alluding to the sand-polished inside smoothness of the...
Podcast review – Elizabeth Goudge’s Little White Horse
Listening time: 13 minutes. One of my top two children's books of all time, I first read Elizabeth Goudge's Little White Horse as a grown up. That didn't...
Appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than are all the analytical kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional individuals. Appreciation may judge, but always with gratitude, and frequently with awe and wonder. Â
By ‘appreciation’ I mean something more than ‘adequate esteem’. Need also enters into it, in the particular sense of turning to the genius of others in order to redress a lack in oneself, or finding in genius a stimulus to one’s own powers, whatever these may emerge as being.
Source: Harold Bloom, Genius (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 5
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