Five Quotes, vol.xviii

                    

inside The Chaucer Bookshop, Canterbury, England

I've been choosing a theme for my reading each month this year, and this month I decided to focus on reading Noreen's books.  I've listened to her tell so many stories that even events that happen in her fiction sound familiar to me because in every story there are bits of herself and her own varied life experiences.  I found some humor in reading a romance novel written by my 94-year-old friend this week, but I was most moved by reading Noreen's memoir of how she came to have faith in Jesus as a busy, married mother of five in the early 1970s.  I love reading people's stories, and I included a small excerpt of her describing the garden because the garden she looked out on after a significant learning experience in her life, is the same garden I look out on as I ponder all God is teaching me in this season.  My children are now the ones playing beneath the willow and the cherry tree.  I'm now the one learning to rest in the God who knows my limitations as I look out at the gray stone walls.

"Few could admit to being the victim of a fatal, historical error, she told herself proudly.  Few people lived, as she did, with the constant feeling of having been born at the wrong time and in the wrong place.  And fewer still realized, as she did, that all that was worth admiring, all that was beautiful and sublime, seemed to be vanishing with hardly a trace.  The world, lamented Prudencia Prim, had lost its taste for beauty, harmony, and balance.  And few could see this truth; just as few could feel within themselves the resolve to make a stand."

- The Awakening of Miss Prim, Natalia Sanmartin Fenollara

"...she was a mistress of the art of delicacy.  Miss Prim firmly believed that delicacy was the force that drove the universe.  Where it was lacking, she knew, the world became gloomy and dark."

- The Awakening of Miss Prim, Natalia Sanmartin Fenollara

"And it was as if a voice said: 'I know your limitations.  I don't expect you to do something you cannot do.  I only ask you to come to me and take me as your Saviour, then I can carry your burden and use you for the work I've planned for you to do.  The work that only you can do for me.'"

- Eye of the Storm, Noreen Riols

"I put down the receiver and looked through the window at the children playing in the garden below.  The sky was the colour of a tea rose and the pink and white blossom sprayed upon the cherry tree was stretching up to meet it; and I saw the beauty of the old gray stone walls encircling my home, the graceful sweep of the weeping willow whose leaves were dusting the lawn."

- Eye of the Storm, Noreen Riols

"Bookish people, I'm sorry to say, have an unfortunate tendency toward elitism.  I know this because I am a bookish person, and also because I hang out with other bookish sorts...We want to cultivate good taste in literature, yes, but there is a marked difference between good taste and elitism."

- The Read-Aloud Family, Sarah Mackenzie