Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
Ann Sancho would be in better health, said her husband, if she did not worry quite so much about him.
Several years after his death, some letters of Ignatius Sancho, a grocer trading from King Charles Street in London and a former slave, were presented to the public in the hope of demonstrating that he was a writer quite as accomplished as many a native English literary man. In this extract, dated October 24th, 1777, he talks (as he often does) about his wife Ann.
Chinese merchant Lien Chi tells a colleague that English liberties have little to do with elections, taxes and regulations.
In a fictional ‘letter’, supposedly by Chinese merchant Lien Chi, Oliver Goldsmith argued that England felt more free than other countries because minor transgressions were winked at until they become too great for safety. On the Continent they maybe had simpler laws and more democracy, but they also had more meddlesome, self-righteous and prying governments.
Marguerite, Lady Blakeney, is powerless to intervene as her husband Sir Percy walks into a trap.
Marguerite St Just, now Lady Blakeney, has followed her husband Sir Percy to France after discovering that that amiable idiot is none other than the dashing Scarlet Pimpernel, responsible for saving so many from the guillotine — including, she hopes, her brother Armand. Concealed behind a curtain in a dirty Calais café, she watches in horror as Citizen Chauvelin draws his net tight around the heedless aristocrat.
The people who oil the wheels of society are not the people who never give offence, they are the people who never take any.
There are those, said American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, who feel they can never really open up, even among their friends, for fear of offending someone. Better, he advised, to choose more robust and sympathetic listeners for your little circle. The hero of an open and accepting society is not the man who never gives offence; it is the man who never takes any.
The man who seems frustratingly dull and awkward may shine in other company, and we owe it to him and to ourselves to read the signs.
If someone seems dull and awkward, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, that may simply be a warning that he is in the wrong company. We should be alert for such signs, and learn to help people find their own company and comfort zone; for forcing everyone to fit the same mould could be disastrous for them and for us.
Schools inspector Edmond Holmes expressed frustration with those who think that society at large owes them unthinking obedience.
‘Dogma’ is merely a Greek word meaning ‘teaching,’ but the word has acquired a negative connotation, associated with narrow-mindedness and invincible ignorance. However, the jibe is often undeserved. A dogmatist is not the man who believes passionately that other people are dangerously wrong, and sets himself apart from them; as Edmond Holmes said, he is the man who sets himself over them.