Take Time to Write

I love this book.

This man wrote an essay for the Sunday Omaha World Herald every week for over 30 years from the 1940s to the 1970s.

He was a great reader and his commentary on books, life, and his own history ring true even today.

This is the kind of book I love to read and the kind I'd love to write.  

It's just vignettes of his own life. He writes about his family, social issues, his memories, his books.  

Some things I enjoyed:

"Gentlemen, babble not to me about the 'weaker sex'. ....Follow your wife around some day if you would know the meaning of work."

"The 'perfect reader'--if there be such a person--is the reader that strikes the balance between the old and the new." 

"I reflected that no place on earth has the magnetic pull of home. Here, surely, is where the heart is. Here are family, warmth, shelter, tranquility, food, drink, restoration, ease, comfort, and the assurance of security."

"For me at least, home is the touchstone, the spring to which you cannot go too many times to drink and be refreshed. It is a refuge, and haven, a retreat from mankind's bloody follies, a calm harbor in a disordered world."

"'When,' another woman asked my wife the other day, 'are you going to use your university education?' Gladie was shocked, 'Use it!" she exclaimed, 'I have used it every waking moment for 31 years!'"

"...a university-educated woman is not wasting that education by remaining a housewife. It is evident in everything about her, from the raising of her children to the decorating of her home to her very personality."

From the 70s
"The sociologists keep yattering that we no longer are communicating as between the young and the old."

"... the home is the heart of any society."

"Nothing that the President can say, or the Pentagon's generals or the business magnates..., has a fraction of importance of what a father and a mother can say in the privacy of the home they have made for themselves and their children."

"How old fashioned I sound! Yet I believe it is true that previous generations worked at being parents. They begot children and had this quaint notion that they were then responsible for them. They provided food and shelter and clothing, they loved their children without being showy about it, they expected discipline and got it, and along with it they got honor and respect."

"Among the disciplines was the dinner table. .... It was the time when all the members of the family sat down--as a family!--belonging to each other."

"What we seem to have lost track of is the dignity of labor and of the fact that college is not the only place in which a person can acquire an education."

"Families are what nations are made of."