Literary Christmas Quotes

Jesus always quickens artistic and literary imagination.

Of the Father’s love begotten, Ere the worlds began to be, He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He, Of the things that are, That have been, And that future years shall see, Evermore and evermore! —Translated from a poem by AURELIUS PRUDENTIUS (Roman, ca. AD 348–415)4

An awful lot of hokum is talked about love, you know. An importance is ascribed to it that is entirely at variance with fact. People talk as though it were self-evidently the greatest of human values. Nothing is less self-evident. Until Plato dressed his sentimental sensuality in a captivating literary form the ancient world laid no more stress on it than was sensible; the healthy realism of the Muslims has never looked upon it as anything but a physical need; it was Christianity, buttressing its emotional claims with neo-Platonism, that made it into the end an aim, the reason, the justification of life. But Christianity was the religion of slaves. It offered the weary and the heavy-laden heaven to compensate them in the future for their misery in this world and the opiate of love to enable them to bear it in the present. And like every drug it enervated and destroyed those who became subject to it. For two thousand years it's suffocated us. It's weakened our wills and lessened our courage. In this modern world we live in we know that almost everything is more important to us than love, we know that only the soft and the stupid allow it to affect their actions, and yet we pay it a foolish lip-service. In books, on the stage, in the pulpit, on the platform the same old sentimental rubbish is talked that was used to hoodwink the slaves of Alexandria.

I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn’t go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children marveling at the mushrooms in the sky, and sabotaged me. I could see why during that short drop before I hit the atoll: the island looks like god’s knuckles in a bathtub, the ocean is beautifully translucent, corals glow underwater, a dead city of bones, allowing a glimpse into a white netherworld. I met the water and fell a few feet into a chromatic cemetery. The longer I lie here, listening to my still functioning electronic innards, the more afraid I grow of detonating after all this time. I don’t share your gods, but I pray I shall die a silent death.

In Mrs. Dimble’s hands the task of airing the little house and making the bed for Ivy Maggs and her jailbird husband became something between a game and a ritual. It woke in Jane vague memories of helping at Christmas or Easter decorations in church when she had been a small child. But it also suggested to her literary memory all sorts of things out of sixteenth-century epithalamiums: age-old superstitions, jokes, and sentimentalities about bridal beds and marriage bowers, with omens at the threshold and fairies upon the hearth. It was an atmosphere extraordinarily alien to that in which she had grown up. A few weeks ago she would have disliked it. Was there not something absurd about that stiff, twinkling archaic world—the mixture of prudery and sensuality, the stylised ardours of the groom and the conventional bashfulness of the bride, the religious sanction, the permitted salacities of Fescennine song, and the suggestion that everyone except the principals might be expected to be rather tipsy? How had the human race ever come to imprison in such a ceremony the most unceremonious thing in the world? But she was no longer sure of her reaction.

With more time spent in their mother's presence, Maggie kept topics of conversation to small stuff, seldom ever wanted to dig below the surface, learned from her mother: just be polite, which makes Callie's own facile mental questioning and creative drive, paired with her physical rigidity, all the more oppositional, and, how they dance around serious subjects, laughable.

William pondered what his next discovery might be. He knew that readers were vexed by the possibility that their Bard might have been Catholic. There is, after all, that suspicious reference to Purgatory by the ghost of Hamlet’s father. In an era when anti-Catholic legislation was favorably viewed by many, such papist skullduggery was improper in a national literary hero. And so, on Christmas Day of 1794, William presented his nation with a fine gift—Shakespeare’s Profession of Faith, in which he disowns any Catholic sympathies. His father was awed by the import of this, so much so that he could no longer keep the discoveries secret. All holiday frivolity was to be set aside now. —

Before Joseph’s eyes, Louisa’s confidence crumbled. Defending her husband’s decisions in Spain, she’d been magnificent, assured, and unfaltering. One mention of her literary talent, and she wilted like a tender plant in a frost. And that, Sir Joseph would not permit. “A devoted knight offers to his lady the most beautiful verse he can find,” Joseph said. “‘How do I learn the number of kisses needed to satisfy my longing for you?’” Louisa’s head came up. Shock registered in her gorgeous green eyes. “Joseph? You know?” He wanted to declaim the entire poem, the entire volume of poetry, but settled for one more line: “‘So many kisses that no intruding eye could count them, nor any gossiping tongue accurately fix their total, much less their precious worth to me.’” “Joseph, you know? You knew?

After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post, called Casa del Mar. It is now considered the Southern part of Morocco. In the early ‘20s, the French pioneering aviation company, Aéropostale, built a landing strip in this desert, for its mail delivery service. By 1925 their route was extended to Dakar, where the mail was transferred onto steam ships bound for Brazil. A monument now stands in Tarfaya, to honor the air carrier and its pilots as well as the French aviator and author Antoine Marie Jean-Baptiste Roger, comte de Saint-Exupéry better known as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. As a newly acclaimed author in the literary world. “Night Flight,” or “Vol de nuit,” was the first of Saint-Exupéry’s literary works and won him the prix Femina, a French literary prize created in 1904. The novel was based on his experiences as an early mail pilot and the director of the “Aeroposta Argentina airline,” in South America. Antoine is also known for his narrative “The Little Prince” and his aviation writings, including the lyrical 1939 “Wind, Sand and Stars” which is Saint-Exupéry’s 1939, memoir of his experiences as a postal pilot. It tells how on the week following Christmas in 1935, he and his mechanic amazingly survived a crash in the Sahara desert. The two men suffered dehydration in the extreme desert heat before a local Bedouin, riding his camel, discovered them “just in the nick of time,” to save their lives. His biographies divulge numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène de Vogüé, known as “Nelly” and referred to as “Madame de B.

This means the literary effect is not the main concern here; the author is more concerned with plot. And that plot must be relatively straightforward, must involve, if at all possible, a twist or two, and must bring resolution.

As a newly acclaimed author in the literary world, Night Flight, or Vol de nuit, was the first of Saint-Exupéry’s literary works and won him the prix Femina, a French literary prize created in 1904. The novel was based on his experiences as an early mail pilot and the director of the Aeroposta Argentina airline in South America. Antoine is also known for his narrative The Little Prince and his aviation writings, including the lyrical 1939 Wind, Sand and Stars, which is Saint-Exupéry’s 1939 memoir of his experiences as a postal pilot. It tells how on the week following Christmas in 1935, just a year after I was born, he and his mechanic amazingly survived a crash in the Sahara desert. The two men suffered dehydration in the extreme desert heat before a local Bedouin, riding his camel, discovered them “just in the nick of time” to save their lives. His biographies were quite hot for the time and divulged numerous affairs, most notably with the Frenchwoman Hélène de Vogüé, known as “Nelly,” who was referred to as “Madame de B.” Photo Caption: Monument of Saint-Exupéry’s airplane in the Sahara desert. Read these award winning books!

Christian literary scholar Anthony Esolen has identified three principal uses of irony—uses that God Himself has displayed richly in the Incarnation, and which faithful Christians have been imitating ever since. They are the irony of time, the irony of power, and the irony of love. God is a masterful writer, and so the Christian faith is therefore the central source of deep, understated, rich and lyrical irony. We love what words can do because we love what the Word has done.

If all things work together for good for them that love God and are called according to His purpose, then this means that billions of plot points are going to come together in the most satisfying cathartic release possible at the end of all time. The great day of resurrection, the eschatological climax, will be what Tolkien called eucatastrophe, and will be literary catharsis writ large, although large is far too small a word for it.

If the history of the world is a story, then theology is a type of literary criticism. We do not just read the story and go with the flow of it, we are also to reflect on it as we read. What is the meaning of the story? We do not just want to know that the infinite God was born as a baby at Bethlehem, we should also want to know what that staggering reality might mean. Of course we must include the great events—creation, fall, the flood, the exile to Babylon. And when we include them, we must rank them, and if we do that, the birth of the Christ in Bethlehem is one of the greatest plot points ever.

Literary Lipsticks by Elaine Equi The Best American Poetry Red Wheelbarrow I Have Eaten the Plums Poppies in October Pink Christmas Red Weather A Rose Is a Rose Jaffa Juice Watermelon Sugar Frost at Midnight

The British Library’s series of Crime Classics concentrates on stories associated with “the Golden Age of murder” , during which the formation of the Detection Club marked a valiant attempt to raise the standards of crime writing. Membership of the Club was by election, and confined to those authors whose work was regarded by their peers as exemplary. Edgar Wallace was among those not deemed eligible to join, because of his focus on writing thrillers rather than carefully plotted whodunnits. In terms of literary merit, his work was often slapdash, but neither Wallace nor his stories were ever lacking in energy or exuberance, and he is represented here by a tale written with his characteristic verve.