What I was is not what I am,
and what I am is not what I was.
Time keeps editing the lines of my face.
I wake wearing yesterday’s questions,
but they fit differently by noon.
Memory argues with the mirror of my acts,
both convinced they are telling the truth.
Change doesn’t ask permission—
it just keeps walking,
and I follow with new understandings,
almost myself.
Good quotes work because they compress insight, lending borrowed clarity to thoughts we haven’t yet shaped cleanly ourselves. I keep a file of favorite quotes so I'm able to revisit them from time to time. Also, they can be useful as intros to stories, articles, essays and blog posts. They are frequently handy.
Here are 19 quotes for pondering as we reflect on the past year and prepare for the year ahead.
"These are the times that try men's souls."
—Thomas Paine
“War does not determine who is right—only who is left.”
— Bertrand Russell
"Optimism is the opium of the people."
—Milan Kundera
"That we live in strange times has, I believe, been established beyond the shadow of a doubt."
—Irina Slav
“The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious,
it seems, takes longer.”
—Edward R. Murrow
"I learned to have pleasure in reading simply because I love stories."
—Abdulrazak Gurnah
“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”
-– Helen Keller.
“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”
—Peter Handke
“Nothing great, nothing of value and nothing that will last
can be got without effort.”
—Andre Gide
"If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal."
— Joni Mitchell
“Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”
-– John Wooden
"What we anticipate seldom occurs;
what we least expected generally happens."
--Benjamin Disraeli
"Read and meditate upon the wars of the great captains. This is the only means of learning the art of war."
—Napoleon Bonaparte
"What matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it."
--Gabriel García Márquez
"The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."
—Gustave Le Bon
"The more the state interferes in the life of a nation, the less free the people will be."
—Friedrich Hayek
Sooner or later...one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.
—Graham Greene
“Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.”
-– Robert Louis Stevenson
"Sincerity is not truth. Being earnest
does not necessarily make one right."
--E. Newman
Because she's too ashamed to admit it, she and her husband replace it with an identical one, going deeply into debt. For ten years, they live in poverty, working tirelessly to repay the loans. When Mathilde finally meets Madame Forestier again and confesses the truth, her friend reveals the necklace was a fake, made of paste and worth almost nothing.
Maupassant was a renowned 19th-century French author, widely regarded as one of the great masters of the short story form and a key figure in the naturalist and realist literary movements. His influence on modern short fiction was profound, impacting writers from O. Henry to Somerset Maugham with his economical style and twist endings.
The story’s famous twist at the end underscores life’s cruel ironies—how small deceptions can have enormous consequences. I think here of a pearl of wisdom that my mother was fond of saying: "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."
The story is likewise a critique of rigid class systems and the pressure to conform to appearances in 19th-century France. In short, “The Necklace” is a timeless parable about pride, honesty, and the high price of chasing illusions.
* * *
Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer who has been described as one of the fathers of the modern short story. By the time he died at age 42 he'd written 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse. Like Chekhov, who died at 44, he his life was too short.
Born on August 5, 1850, in Normandy, France (likely at the Château de Miromesnil near Dieppe), he grew up in a bourgeois family that had recently adopted the noble "de" prefix. His parents separated when he was 11, and he was raised primarily by his literary-minded mother, Laure Le Poittevin, who introduced him to classics like Shakespeare. As a youth, he developed a love for outdoor activities, particularly boating and fishing in Normandy. He probably would have enjoyed living here in Minnesota, the "land of 10,000 lakes."
His literary career was launched through his mentorship under Gustave Flaubert—a close family friend—who rigorously trained him in precise, objective writing and introduced him to prominent writers like Émile Zola and Ivan Turgenev. Flaubert treated Maupassant less like a prodigy and more like a craft apprentice. For years, Flaubert forbade him from publishing, insisting he master sentence rhythm, structure, and restraint first. Maupassant later said Flaubert taught him “to see, not to invent.”
"I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt," he once said.
In 1880, his breakthrough short story "Boule de Suif" (often translated as "Ball of Fat" or "Dumpling") appeared in a collection and earned immediate acclaim for its sharp social commentary on hypocrisy during the war. Much, if not most of his writing was produced in the decade that followed. According to the critics, his style was characterized by concise prose, irony, psychological insight, and often pessimistic views of human nature, society, and fate.
It was said that Maupassant could draft a short story in a single sitting, sometimes in a few hours. Yet he revised obsessively. Friends described him reading sentences aloud, testing their weight and cadence, a habit inherited directly from Flaubert.
Another influence: As a young man, Maupassant served during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71). He witnessed cowardice, cruelty, and moral collapse firsthand. This experience stripped him of romantic illusions and shaped the unsentimental realism of stories like “Boule de Suif” and “Two Friends.”
Maupassant contracted syphilis in his early 20s (common at the time) and refused treatment. By the late 1880s, it caused severe mental deterioration, paranoia, hallucinations, and physical decline—reflected in works like "Le Horla." In 1892, he attempted suicide by slitting his throat and was committed to a Paris asylum, where he died on July 6, 1893, at age 42.
I heard the bells on Christmas Day
This memory brought to mind another memory from near fifty years ago. There was a missionary family on furlough from their missionary service in Yemen. It was a large family and they were a musical family. They sang songs for us with a Middle Eastern cadence in a haunting minor key that feels both evocative and mysterious, like a story full of longing and hidden strength.
One of the songs so touched me that I asked them to write the words for me, which I share with you now.
Love is oneness, oh how sweet
to obey this law;
The unlovely we may meet
need our love the more.
Make us one, oh Love, we plead,
With men’s sorrow and their need.
We are one in needing love,
let us true love show;
Only Love’s Son from above
makes our spirits grow.
Love us, this is our heart’s need,
Let us love and live indeed.
We are also one in this:
we must love or die.
Loving others is true bliss,
self-love is a lie.
Love of self is inward strife,
Love turned outward is true life.
Let us love and fruitful be,
love is God’s own breath;
Love will kindle love and see
new life born from death.
Nowhere is a heaven more sweet
than where loving spirits meet.
* * *
May your holiday season include re-connecting
with those who are important to you
and with those who need you.
"Now we see through a glass, darkly..."
~ 1 Corinthians 13:12a
 |
| Painting by the author, 24"x 24" |
The others immediately recognize this as absurd. Disagreement about the precise count does not mean there were no birds—or that the number was whatever anyone wants it to be.
Yet this very logic is often used against Christianity today. People point to disagreements among theologians and denominations—differing views on communion, baptism, or the relative importance of certain doctrines—and conclude that Christian truth is entirely subjective. They claim there is no objective truth about God, that religion is just personal preference, and that we can never really know anything for certain.
That conclusion is as mistaken as denying the blackbirds existed.
There was a definite, specific number of blackbirds, even if the observers could not verify it or agree on it. No reasonable person would say the flock’s size was arbitrary or unknowable in principle.
The same is true of God and moral truth. God has a definite nature and specific attributes, whether or not human beings fully agree on what they are. Truth is not whatever we want it to be.
Agnostics often say, “We can’t know whether God exists or what He is like.” Others insist God is simply whatever each person imagines Him to be. But that is no different from claiming the flock contained whatever number of birds each observer preferred, rather than acknowledging there was one actual number.
The Bible promises the opposite: if we sincerely seek God, we will find Him. We can come to know more and more of His true character. In this life we see only dimly, “through a glass darkly,” yet many of us have glimpsed enough—heard His voice, seen His hand at work—to be certain He is there. And we trust that one day we shall know Him fully, just as clearly as we could have known the exact number of blackbirds if we had been given the chance to count them.
Revised from journal note of July 11, 2002
