August Gleanings

August is the cruelest month to gather gleanings, so a smaller than usual harvest.

For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses. (Robert Louis Stevenson)

The only way of ensuring a happy married life is to get it thoroughly clear at the outset who is going to skipper the team. My own dear wife settled the point during the honeymoon, and ours has been an ideal union. (Uncle Fred in the Springtime, PG Wodehouse)

To me, the most beautiful word in the English language is cellar-door. Isn’t it wonderful? The ones I like, though, are ‘cheque’ and ‘enclosed.’ (Dorothy Parker)

”You’ll have heard of the Official Secrets Act,” the head of the secret service begins on his first meeting with Wooster. Bertram shakes his head, then brightly adds: “Just goes to prove how effective it is, what?” (Jeeves and the King of Clubs, Ben Schott)

To me the outdoors is what you must pass through in order to get from your apartment into a taxicab. (Fran Lebowitz)

Though books, as Milton says, may be the embalming of mighty spirits, they are also the resurrection of rebellious, reactionary, fantastical, and wicked spirits! In books dwell all the demons and all the angels of the human mind. It is for this reason that a bookshop – especially a second-hand bookshop – is an arsenal of explosives, an armoury of revolutions, an opium den of reaction. (John Cowper Powys, 1872 – 1963)

Books don’t furnish a room; they are another room, an annexe of my memory. (Christopher Bellew)