iosephvs bibliothecarivs > Recent Status Updates

'Over time Mr. [Gavin] Friday has found a role as a kind of midwife to our albums, arriving late, when everyone knows everyone else's opinion on everything and can't stand the sight of each other. Gavin will walk into the room with fresh ears and a pair of forceps.'

I love 'Mr. Friday' <3
gavinfriday.com/biography/

'"There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall," is how the English critic Cyril Connolly summed it up. Unless, that is, you want to write about the contradictions of your new life.... This fear of either losing creativity or mistreating creation. There's nothing any man can make--can imagine, write, draw, or sing into being--that is as beautiful as that child in that pram.'

'[U2]'s deep hope is that Ireland will, by peaceful and democratic means, one day become a united Ireland again.'

This powerful statement hit like a thunderbolt. I've been a fan of the band for 25 years and have read countless books, profiles, etc, and never knew where the band members stood on reunification.

'Before the victory is won some may have to get scarred up, but we shall overcome. Before the victory of brotherhood is achieved, some will maybe face physical death, but we shall overcome. Before the victory is won, some will lose jobs, some will be called communists, and reds, merely because they believe in brotherhood... but we shall overcome.'

'"So you're not a Christian band then?" such people would ask Adam.

"I'm in a band with Bono," he'd laugh. "For that alone I deserve an access-all-areas pass through the pearly gates."

'Ten, nine, eight, seven has nothing on a punk rock singer yelling ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR.'

"It was almost as messy, but for me [writing original songs with early U2] was just like being born. Punk rock slapped me on my naked arse and I just started wailing.'

'Yet keeping calm the knight
just quipped, "Why should I shy
away. If fate is kind
or cruel, man still must try."'

'Each year, short lived, is unlike the last
and rarely resolves in the style it arrived.'

'Folly finds the man who flirts with the fool.'

'Can you imagine what it would be like to be able to take off and swoop and glide wherever you wanted, spiraling in the sky without a care in the world, watching the earth below shrink into insignificance, entirely in control of your own destiny? It is one of the great sadnesses of my life that I will never know what it's like to fly.'

'My present conviction manifested itself during this time [the creation of The Seventh Seal]. I believe a human being carries his or her own holiness, which lies within the realm of the earth; there are no otherworldly explanations. So in the film lives a remnant of my honest, childish piety lying peacefully alongside a harsh and rational perception of reality.'

'The spirit of the allotment lives on in the English love affair with the back garden. All across the country, every day, people reap and sow, prune and mow, seed and dig their little patches of well-watered ground. The very word 'garden' comes from the Old English 'garth', meaning a plot of enclosed land.'

'Religious belief, like human nature, is complex, changeable, and in many cases flexible, and that is not necessarily a flaw.'

'The hilly landscape was gorgeous and extravagantly green. You could be excused for thinking that the principle industry of Britain is the manufacture of chlorophyll. We chauntered along among wooded hills, scattered farms, churches with square towers that made them look like leftover pieces from a very large chess set.'

'Modern England is so strewn with the debris of the past that we may be forgiven for ignoring it. Walk along the Thames path at Rotherhithe and you pass the outline of an Edwardian manor house - a stone building that once overlooked the river. It belonged to Edward III [1312-1377], not Edward VII [1841-1910]. Yet it does not feel out of place between the wings of a modern housing estate.'

2/2 'So individuals in the struggle must come to realize that it is necessary to aid time, that without this kind of aid, time itself will become an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of social stagnation.'

'We hear this quite often, that only time can solve this problem.... Well the people who argue this do not themselves realize that time is neutral, that it can be used constructively or deconstructively. At points the people of ill will, the segregationists, have used time much more effectively than the people of good will.' 1/2

'[Chaucer] was not a poet who happened to be a diplomat and government official; he was a government official and diplomat who, in his spare time, happened to write poetry.'

"Other reading apps use people to recommend books. We use books to recommend people."

Sign up early for the forthcoming app Klerb at https://www.warmstart.me/waiti/f91c2b...

'Where [John Paul II] surprised everybody was in his berserk canonizations of everyone in sight: quite apart from the 1,340 men and women whom he beatified, the first step to sainthood, he canonized no fewer than 483 new saints, more than had been made in the previous five centuries.'