Today's episode of The Literary Life podcast is in celebration of our 100th episode! Our host held a LIVE Q&A session in the Patreon group, fielding questions from patrons and social media followers alike. Questions range from topics such as what has surprised them about their reading lives this year, to what writing projects they have going on behind the scenes, to literary landmarks and so much more! Thank you to all our listeners and supporters for making this journey possible and for just listening every week. We appreciate each and every one of you!

Join us again next week for our discussion of Frank Uhlman's short story "Reunion."

We are excited to announce our third annual Literary Life Back to School Online Conference! This year's theme is Awakening: The Pursuit of True Education, and our featured guest speaker is James Daniels. The conference will take place on August 4-7, 2021, and you can learn more and register at morningtimeformoms.com. 

Cindy also has some exciting announcements, including the debut of the new expanded edition of her book Morning Time: A Liturgy of Love, is now available! AND she is starting a new Charlotte Mason podcast called The New Mason Jar, set to begin airing on August 5, 2021! 

Listen to The Literary Life:

Commonplace Quotes:

If you've got something you want to say, just think first as to whether it's really worthwhile, and you're sure to find that it isn't.

Hugh Walpole, "The Enemy in Ambush"

The vicar's wife would not be quite that endless whimper of self-pity which she now is, if she did not in a sense "love" the family. The continued disappointment of her continued and ruthless demand for sympathy, for affection, for appreciation has helped to make her what she is. The greed to be loved is a fearful thing. Some of those who say, and almost with pride, that they live only for love, come at last to live in incessant resentment.

C. S. Lewis

Lastly, from the properties (the castle on the mountain, the cottage in the wood, the helpful beasts, the guardian dragons, the cave, the fountain, the trysting lane, etc.), he will acquire the basic symbols to which he can add railway trains, baths, wrist-watches and what-have-you from his own experience, and so build up a web of associations which are the only means by which his inner and outer life, his past and his present, can be related to, and mentally enrich, each other. Half our troubles, both individual neuroses and collective manias like nationalism, seem to me to be caused largely by our poverty of symbols, so that not only do we fail to relate one experience to another but also we have to entrust our whole emotional life to the few symbols we do have.

W.H. Auden, In Praise of the Brothers Grimm, The New York Times Book Review, 12 November 1944

Imagination

by John Davidson

There is a dish to hold the sea,
A brazier to contain the sun,
A compass for the galaxy,
A voice to wake the dead and done!

That minister of ministers,
Imagination, gathers up
The undiscovered Universe,
Like jewels in a jasper cup.

Its flame can mingle north and south;
Its accent with the thunder strive;
The ruddy sentence of its mouth
Can make the ancient dead alive.

The mart of power, the fount of will,
The form and mould of every star,
The source and bound of good and ill,
The key of all the things that are,

Imagination, new and strange
In every age, can turn the year;
Can shift the poles and lightly change
The mood of men, the world's career.

Book List:

God in the Dock by C. S. Lewis

Live Not By Lies by Rod Dreher

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall by Sir Thomas Browne

The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom

A. W. Tozer

Trusting God by Jerry Bridges

Between Walden and the Whirlwind by Jean Fleming

Edith Schaeffer

Esther de Waal

The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis

Northrop Frye

George Lyman Kittredge

Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder

All God's Children and Blue Suede Shoes by Ken Meyers

King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard

Dorothy L. Sayers

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Connect with Us:

You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/

Find Cindy at morningtimeformoms.com, on Instagram @cindyordoamoris and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/cindyrollins.net/. Check out Cindy's own Patreon page also!

Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let's get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB