Foreign Grid

“Jesus, may Your pure and healthy blood circulate in my ailing organism, and may Your pure and healthy body transform my weak body, and may a healthy and vigorous life throb within me, if it is truly Your holy will that I should set about the work in question; and this will be a clear sign of Your holy will for me.”
― Maria Faustyna Kowalska, Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy in My Soul

“that if the Lord demands something of a soul, He gives it the means to carry it out, and through grace He makes it capable of doing this.”
― Maria Faustyna Kowalska, Diary: Divine Mercy in My Soul

“As for imagery, actions, moods, and themes, I find myself unable to separate them usefully. In a profoundly conceived, craftily written novel such as The Lord of the Rings, all these elements work together indissolubly, simultaneously. When I tried to analyse them out I just unraveled the tapestry and was left with a lot of threads, but no picture. So I settled for bunching them all together. I noted every repetition of any image, action, mood, or theme without trying to identify it as anything other than a repetition.

I was working from my impression that a dark event in the story was likely to be followed by a brighter one (or vice versa); that when the characters had exerted terrible effort, they then got to have a rest; that each action brought a reaction, never predictable in nature, because Tolkien’s imagination is inexhaustible, but more or less predictable in kind, like day following night, and winter after fall.

This “trochaic” alternation of stress and relief is of course a basic device of narrative, from folktales to War and Peace; but Tolkien’s reliance on it is striking. It is one of the things that make his narrative technique unusual for the mid–twentieth century. Unrelieved psychological or emotional stress or tension, and a narrative pace racing without a break from start to climax,
characterise much of the fiction of the time. To readers with such expectations, Tolkien’s plodding stress/relief pattern seemed and seems simplistic, primitive. To others it may seem a remarkably simple, subtle technique of keeping the reader going on a long and ceaselessly rewarding journey.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

“It's the chattering buzz of ideologically possessed demons.”
― Jordan B. Peterson