Mother's Christmas Bread, my favorite of holiday breads.

“Is not this a glorious time of year for your deep inward fires?”

—Thoreau, November 13, 1851

Via Austin Kleon

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Dorothy L. Sayers, from her essay “Why Work?” (1942):

War is a judgment that overtakes societies when they have been living upon ideas that conflict too violently with the laws governing the universe…. Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations; and whichever side may be the more outrageous in its aims and the more brutal in its methods, the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.

It strikes me that this is equally true of the culture war that Americans have been fighting with one another for quite some time.

Alan Jacobs

“We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. ‘Thou shalt not’ is soon forgotten, but ‘Once upon a time’ lasts forever.”

Phillip Pulman via The Writer’s Almanac