In private one can well be a cat that walks by itself, and without roots in any specific soil: but in the great battle for the Kingdom of God it seem… - Ida Friederike Görres

isn't every kind of conformity really a sort of masquerade, the mask at once conspicuous and disguising?

Even read in such broken bits Origen is real food and drink. You can feel it being absorbed, right away, into your very blood. How terse, how compact he is! All this modern stuff is barley-water in comparison.

I've just finished a (for me) very important book about the parents (Louis Martin and Zélie Martin) of the Little Flower..It confirms my thesis 100 per cent: that everything claimed by her super-heralds as her direct inspiration, her unique originality, in fact stemmed from inheritance, upbringing and repetition...Most interesting for me is the recognition how alien and remote this bourgeois piety of the late nineteenth century has become, even for cultivated contemporary Catholic writers - a veritable terra incognita; otherwise this so wide-spread legend of Thérèse's uniqueness could never have grown up.