Well Said

Every so often I write down something I particularly like that I've just read.  Here is part of my current collection.

• Of his gorgeous, remote, and mountainous principality in northwestern Pakistan, The Mir of Hunza once called it "The happy land of just enough."  He also spoke of one's "young, middle, and rich years."
• This lovely line, "...the noise of failure growing beautiful," describes the wind trying to blow leaves off an aspen tree a month too early.  From the poem, August in Waterton, Alberta, by Bill Holm.
• Apparently Franz Liszt described composer John Field's nocturnes as "dissolving into delicious melancholy."  Field (who died in 1837) wrote the first nocturnes.  Everyone else, including Chopin, copied the form. 
• From Robert Higgs, Truncating the Antecedents:  "Unvarnished truth is to our rulers as holy water is to vampires."
• Here's one from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa that captured me because it reflects my love of places that are a few thousand feet above sea level.  "Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart.  In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought:  Here I am, where I ought to be."
• I pulled this out of Alexander McCall Smith's The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection:  "Every life needs spells of calm, every life needs expanses of time when nothing much occurs, when one may sit for several hours in the same place and gaze upon static things, upon some waxen-leafed desert plant, perhaps, or a path of dry grass.  Or a group of cattle standing under a tree for the shade, the slow, flicking movement of their tails the only indication that they are animate beasts, not rocks; or a sky across which no clouds, or perhaps only the merest wisp of white, move."

This spot, overlooking St-Remy, France, would count as my family's most memorable "spell of calm" spot.  After a picnic, we sat upon this hill, listened to the wind, wished we lived in St-Remy, and let the sun warm us as the scene filled us with its silence.

• A young couple (family members) recently put themselves on a 30-day restricted health regimen (no grains, dairy, legumes, processed oils and only certain veggies and meats) and said, on Day 17, "Lately we've been feeling OK I think.  Today at dinnertime we were dancing around the kitchen improvising a song about pickles in Ethel Merman voices until the children begged us to stop."
• Two from Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs.  "Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of."  And, "... the days flew by like a handful of flowers flung to the sea wind."