A warm welcome to the Bibliocracy. If only the world were ruled by obsessive readers instead of those who boast that they have never read a book!

So little in life is new. The wisdom in books and works of art is endless.

I can best introduce this site with words that touch or inspire me…

Ripping a quote from a poem or novel can be an act of vandalism. It can be misleading, changing the meaning, losing the context. But there are lines of such excellence that they survive and dodge those risks.

Say this one aloud, feel that sinuous rhythm. Applaud the wise sentiment.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught

                                                                     W.B. Yeats, A Prayer for My Daughter

 I love silence, struggle with noise and company. For us, Samuel Beckett is the man:

Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet only then can you detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy, 116

Like most people, I have faced tough times and been forced to discover whether I am brave or cowardly. On courage, listen to Marilynne Robinson:

Now, your mother never talks about herself, really, and she never admits to having felt any sort of grief in her life at all. That’s her courage, her pride, and I know you will be respectful of it, and remember at the same time that a very, very great gentleness is called for, a great kindness. Because no one ever has that sort of courage who hasn’t needed it.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead,156

I agree with the insight, never written by Freud (and at most a comment reported second-hand), that love and work are the cornerstones of life. Here is love:

There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
TS Eliot, East Coker

I hope you will enjoy my rather homely, homemade and homespun site!

[PS I will endeavour always to give a proper reference to quotations. The absence of sources on many internet sites is frustrating but also feeds many false attributions.]