Anything can happen at a county agricultural fair. It is the perfect human occasion, the harvest of the fields and of the emotions. To the fair come the man and his cow, the boy and his girl, the wife and her green tomato pickle, each anticipating victory and the excitement of being separated from his money by familiar devices. It is at a fair that a man can be drunk forever on liquor, love, or fights; at a fair that your front pocket can be picked by a trotting horse looking for sugar, and your hind pocket by a thief looking for his fortune.

–E.B. White

 

Living in cities, we forget how lost are cities in the vast green that reaches the length and breadth of America. Technological our economy may be, but still the great factory is the green leaf, the blade of grass or corn, the leaf of tree.

–Hal Borland

Sometimes I think that those of us who are now in our 30s were born into the last generation to carry the burden of “home,” to find in family life the source of all tension and drama.

–Joan Didion

Home is the place where when you have to go there / They have to take you in.

–Robert Frost

Home is where the college student home for the holidays isn’t.

–Laurence J. Peter

A home is not a mere transient shelter: its essence lies in its permanence, in its capacity of accretion and solidification, in its quality of representing in all its details, the personalities of the people who live in it.

–H.L. Mencken

Make me a willow-cabin at your gate, / And call upon my soul within the house.

 –William Shakespeare, Twelfth-Night

 

Each phenomenon on earth is an allegory, and each allegory is an open gate through which the soul, if it is ready, can pass into the interior of the world where you and I and day and night are all one. In the course of his life, every human being comes upon that open gate, here or there along the way; everyone is sometimes assailed by the thought that everything visible is an allegory and that behind the allegory live spirit and eternal life. Few, to be sure, pass through the gate and give up the beautiful illusion for the surmised reality of what lies within.

 –Hermann Hesse, Strange News from Another Star

Only the man who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality.

–Carl Jung

The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

 –Willa Cather

If you are sure you understand everything that is going on, you are hopelessly confused.

 –Walter Mondale

An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.

 –William Bernbach

(Each week this column features quotations gleaned from the readings and experiences of our editors, reporters, readers, and friends. All are invited to submit quotations for inclusion here. They may be sent to Gleanings, c/o The Newtown Bee, 5 Church Hill Road, Newtown, CT 06470 or emailed to editor@thebee.com.)