Status Updates From A City of Bells (Torminster...

"The sight of perfection was like a gate that let one out into freedom, and if one could make small things so lovely then it seemed that one had not got to go very far or own very much to be free. 'I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count myself a king of infinite space.' It was not the size of things that mattered but their perfection, it was not what one had that was important but what one made."

"[the local dentist,] had an excellent moral character and there were doubtless great good in him professionally as well as morally, though Grandfather had not personally been able to test his capabilities because of having no teeth, but only the best dentist in England, Grandfather considered, was fit to touch the precious pearls upon which his beloved grandchildren relied for mastication."

"'Will you have skin, Hugh Anthony?' asked Grandmother, for she did not make the children eat milk-pudding-skin if they did not want to.
'No,' said Hugh Anthony shortly.
'No, what?' asked Grandmother, who was punctilious about 'thank you' being inserted in the proper place.
'No skin,' said Hugh Anthony."

"With his lovely eyes fixed on the altar and an expression of great spiritual beauty on his face he was wondering just when to blow the whistle. Should he accompany the last hymn on it or should he blow one shrill blast in the middle of the Dean's sermon? It was difficult to decide. He must, as Grandfather said one should, wait and be guided."

😲 Oh, no!!!! 🤣

"There was something flattering in the fact that an intelligent young man from London should think it worth his while to settle down among them and minister to their intellectual needs. It implied that he had the highest opinion of their mental powers and was grieved that residence so far from the Metropolis should debar them from the full exercise of the same."

"How can we help loving houses when they stand to us for so much," he said. "Warmth and protection and a means of expressing ourselves. You love a new house because it stands there waiting to be good to human beings and an old one because it has been."

"He [Grandfather] sat on the board, they told her later, though what the board was and why he sat on it they omitted to explain. Henrietta forever after had a mental vision of a see-saw and Grandfather sitting on one end of it with the Mayor, who was also on the board, on the other, and soaring to heaven and sinking again to earth with delighted chuckles." 😂

"'Our destiny is like a wind blowing,' said Grandfather. 'It carries us along. But now and again the wind seems to drop. We don't know what to do next. Then it may be that a blade of grass growing in the road beside us bends slightly. It is a tiny movement, slight as a whim, but enough to show us which way to take.'"