All living things are boundlessly suggestive, if only you are willing to heed them.
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Lewis on “Age Specific” Books
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty — except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all.
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Dante on The Exile’s Longing
If it should happen. . . If this sacred poem— this work so shared by heaven and by earth that it has made me lean through these long years— can ever overcome the cruelty that bars me from the fair fold where I slept, a lamb opposed to wolves that war on it, by then with other voice, with other fleece, I shall return as poet and put on, at my baptismal font, the laurel crown.
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Mullins on Shattered Dreams and Whispered Prayers
And the lady in the harbor, She still holds her torch out To those huddled masses who are Yearning for a freedom that still eludes them. The immigrant's children see their brightest dreams shattered Here on the New Jersey shoreline in the Greed and the glitter of those high-tech casinos, But some mendicants wander off into a cathedral, And they stoop in the silence And there their prayers are still whispered.
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Colum McCann on Gazing Homewards
Sheila wore a wide-brimmed straw hat over her long white hair. Corrigan dabbed his handkerchief on her brow. She scratched out some sounds from her throat. She had that emigrant’s sadness — she would never go back to her old country — it was gone in more senses than one — but she was forever gazing homewards anyway.