Living Things

“Living things must constantly be broken up and destroyed; it is only the dead things than can be left alone.”

G. K. Chesterton – “The Riddle of the Restoration” Lunacy and Letters

Swimming Upstream

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

G. K. Chesterton, “The Five Deaths of the Faith” The Everlasting Man

chance of turning back

“But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end”

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

Silence Strengthens

“Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us.”

G. K. Chesterton – The Father Brown Omnibus