Burton Hills Quotes

A great library cannot be constructed; it is the growth of ages.

Happiness is not a destination. It is a method of life.

At the crisp, inky hour of midnight, Jack and I are married atop Spiral Hill in the Death Door's Cemetery. Wind stirs the bone-dry leaves, and Jack takes my soft rag doll hands in his--the coolness of his fingers calming the flutter rippling across my stitched seams.

Bach was the daddy: without him there’d be no jazz, funk or hip-hop; no techno, no house, no grime. He basically wrote the blueprint for everything that was to come. His stuff is wise and witty and capacious enough to contain more than just multitudes: it contains all of everything.

The second point is that, in the key industries we have studied, the state failed as an economic developer. It failed first as a subsidizer of industrial growth. Vanderbilt showed this in his triumph over the Edward Collins' fleet and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company in the 1850s. James J. Hill showed this forty years later when his privately built Great Northern outdistanced the subsidized Northern Pacific and Union Pacific. The state next failed in the role of an entrepreneur when it tried to build and operate an armor plant in competition with Charles Schwab and Bethlehem Steel. The state also seems to have failed as an active regulator of trade. The evidence in this study is far from conclusive; but we can see problems with the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Anti-trust Act, both of which were used against the efficient Hill and Rockefeller.

in the 1890s, American rails were inferior to some foreign rails, so Hill bought English and German rails for the Great Northern. The subsidized transcontinentals were required in their charters to buy American-made steel, so they were stuck with the lesser product. Their charters also required them to carry government mail at a discount, and this cut into their earnings. Finally, without Congressional approval, the subsidized railroads could not build spur lines off the main line. Hill's Great Northern, in contrast, looked like an octopus, and he credited spur lines as critical to his success.

Hill was sad and predicted that the ICC and the Sherman Act would ruin American railroads and threaten cheap trade throughout the nation. A 72-year-old Hill would even write a book, Highways of Progress, to argue this point. But his last days seem to have been happy. He had built the best railroad in America and had used it to beat subsidized rivals time and again. He helped open the Northwest to settlement and the Orient to American trade. He had made a difference in the way the world worked. To some viewers, he was the real hero in the drama of the American transcontinental railroads.

She was like a Tim Burton caricature—without the charisma or whimsy.

11 February Nocturne for violin and piano by Lili Boulanger (1893–1918)

Scott saw its ludicrous proportions; and it is likely that posterity will remember the Pictish question in the discussion between Monkbarns and Sir Arthur Wardour after the volumes of Whitaker, Goodall, Pinkerton, Chalmers, Ritter, and Grant have been long entombed in their proper shelves.

Dirait-on’ – ‘Should We Say’ from Les chansons des roses by Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943)

It is said that Edward had very enlightened, advanced, and comprehensive ideas of statesmanship; that he wished to fuse England, Scotland, and Wales into one grand monarchy, with anticipation of a great future for the whole. The extreme exasperation he felt, and the savage cruelty he showed to the patriotic Scots who opposed him, were quite a natural result of the baffling and frustration of his wise conception and benificent designs. In the history of nations, as in that of philosophy, we are very apt to interject into ancient actors and thinkers modern ideas, at which, probably, they would have stood amazed. At the best, this view of the character and motives of Edward is a mere hypothesis. But, supposing him to have held that it was infinitely better for Scotland to submit to his rule, that hardly gave him a right to use violence, brutality, and murder to enforce his views.

Violin Sonata no. 1 in A major, op. 13 1: Allegro molto by Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924)

Mass for Five Voices 5: Agnus Dei by William Byrd (c. 1539/40–1623)

8 February Homo fugit velut umbra (Passacaglia della vita) by Stefano Landi (1587–1639)

7 February Miserere by Gregorio Allegri (c. 1582–1652)

Burton's History of Scotland and the widespread welcome it received, both within the nation and internationally, is incompatible with the view that Scottish history suffered a mortal decline, that there was some kind of atypical, catastrophic failure of national historical confidence in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, the country produced, and welcomed, a national narrative that incorporated the full range of characteristics typifying the national histories produced around the same period across Europe.

In historical literature, Scotland has taken the lead of every other European country. This makes it not a little remarkable, that no continuous and complete national history has been attempted until very recently. The contributions of Robertson, Pinkerton, Laing, Hume, and we may add to the list, McCrie, Cook, and others, refer chiefly to insulated periods, more or less interesting; and allowing for the prejudices and predelictions of some of the writers, they all form either valuable portions, or amusing fragments of the Scottish annals.

17 March Nocturne no. 5 in B flat major by John Field (1782–1837)

In the month of March by Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996)

How Sweet the Moonlight’ from The Merchant of Venice by Jocelyn Pook (b. 1960)

Abendlied – Evening Song by Robert Schumann (1810–1856)

6 Mélodies, op. 5 No. 3 in E flat major: Andante soave by Fanny Mendelssohn (1805–1847)

22 May Au Gré des ondes – Along the waves 5: ‘Hommage à Bach’ by Henri Dutilleux (1916–2013)

Ambre by Nils Frahm (b. 1982)

Violin Sonata no. 1 in G major, op. 78 1: Vivace ma no troppo by Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)

10 May Piano Concerto no. 2 in F major, op. 102 2: Andante by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975)

I don’t know about your life, but serenity and peace are in critically short supply in mine, so I’ll take it where I can get it.

Somehow even when things fall apart, music endures.

head, forget all of your thoughts; all my senses now will sink into slumber.

. . . and so we arrived at a ford that of course we couldn’t cross. To crown it all, it was raining. Captains Denegre and Tucker went off in the gathering darkness through mud ankle-deep, reappearing with news of a house somewhere into which we might be taken. Whatever failed us in those days, it was not Virginian hospitality! The good people whose home we invaded seemed more than pleased to receive us, and next morning betimes started us again “On to Richmond.” By that time all Christmas cheer had gone out of us. To reach a ferry, where there was only a tiny makeshift of a skiff, we and the mules wearily took up the burden of life again, plodding five miles through sloughs and hopeless mud, up perpendicular hills and down again, till every bone ached and philosophy ceased to be a virtue. Once more on the shores of classic Pamunkey, liquid mud flowing everywhere, in prospect a crossing, two by two, in a miserable egg-shell made of slimy planks, the bottom quite under water! The crowning feat of our expedition was, on reaching the other shore, all vehicles failing, to take heart of grace and walk six miles, in a downpour, to the nearest station of the railway. If it is asked what were our notions of perfection, I would answer that in those days we were sustained by what Cervantes styled “the bounding of the soul, the bursting of laughter, and the quicksilver of the five senses.” From Recollections Grave and Gay by Mrs. Burton Harrison. Scribners, New York, 1911.

Hey, you heard about Pluto? That's messed up.

(Describing a stop at a village cafe in Italy while filming Taming of the Shrew) It was a perfect choice, the kind of place where chickens brood under the table, though there were none here There was the usual arbour of vines. Two men there intrigued Elizabeth. One was a distinguished oldish man, well dressed, who sat alone at a terraced table and neither ate nor drank nor moved. The other looked like a mendicant monk of some obscure order. He read from a parchment and ate bread. He didn't look up at all. He had a large beard. At seven-thirty just at dusk a Mass began at the church on the hill the other side of the road The Church of the Madonna of the Divine Love. The voices of the choir drifted on the air like an invisible mist, like unseen tumbleweed, like a dream. we stopped eating our fave (raw kidney beans) and rough cheese and we stopped drinking the vin de pays to listen. It was one of those moments which are nostalgic before they're over. The two men had gone, the tramp monk maybe to the Mass and the other who knows where. we drove home feeling holy and clean while the moon bright as I've ever seen her and with a wisp of chiffon cloud around her throat (E's image not mine) shone on us from the cloudless night.

If the government had not subsidized a transcontinental, then private investors like Hill would have built them sooner and would have built them better. Subsidy promoters tried to deny this argument at the time, but Hill's achievement shows that it would have been done, only at a slower (but more efficient) pace.

What Hill ultimately deplored more than tariffs and subsidies were the ICC and the Sherman Anti-trust Act. Congress passed these vague laws to protest rate hikes and monopolies. They were passed to satisfy public clamor (which was often directed at wrong-doing committed by Hill's subsidized rivals). Because they were vaguely written, they were harmless until Congress and the Supreme Court began to give them specific meaning. And here came the irony: laws that were passed to thwart monopolists, were applied to, thwart Hill.

Fid-mer,” or the evening flyer, is the Somali name for a bat. These little animals are not disturbed in houses, because they keep off flies and mosquitoes, the plagues of the Somali country. Flies abound in the very jungles wherever cows have been, and settle in swarms upon the traveller. Before the monsoon their bite is painful, especially that of the small green species; and there is a red variety called “Diksi as,” whose venom, according to the people, causes them to vomit. The latter abounds in Gulays and the hill ranges of the Berberah country: it is innocuous during the cold season. The mosquito bites bring on, according to the same authority, deadly fevers: the superstition probably arises from the fact that mosquitoes and fevers become formidable about the same time.