365 True Things: 220/Books

The Noble Society of Pudding Owners:
Bunyip Bluegum (the koala bear), Barnacle Bill (the sailor),
Albert (the Puddin'), and Sam Sawnoff (the penguin bold)

A few of my favorite books when I was growing up were Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (at age ten, I received the gift of a fiftieth-anniversary edition with color plates when my family visited Hong Kong on our way to Tokyo); Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins; Nancy Drew; The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, with illustrations by Jules Feiffer; several of the Oz books; The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay (an Australian classic); and, perhaps my most favorite, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. 

Here are a few quotes from Wrinkle, because I'm feeling lazy blogwise today:

“You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.” 

“Believing takes practice.”

“We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.”

“The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”

“Like and equal are not the same thing at all.”

"Nothing is hopeless; we must hope for everything." —Mrs. Who, quoting Euripides

“Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point. French. Pascal. The heart has its reasons, whereof reason knows nothing.” —Mrs. Who

“Qui plus sait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.”—Mrs. Who, quoting Voltaire

“Experiment is the mother of knowledge.”

“I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.”