A good start

By Lex On April 17, 2006

My grandmother, God rest her soul, was a packrat. I’ve a lovely collection of letters she wrote and received to and from her Richmond, Virginia correspondents while working as a nurse in San Francisco, back in 1903 – she would have been just 28 years old at the time. I ran across just them in a box just the other day, and was fascinated – here was not the elderly lady dying from complications of diabetes that I know only in dim flashes of childhood memory, but a young, vital, active woman a very long way from home, in what was still very much a frontier town. Accustomed as I am to the modern day ephmera of SMS text messages, emails and even weblogs, I was struck by the beautiful penmanship, and genteel expression of even mundane sentiments – life moved much more slowly then. These letters offer a strangely compelling insight into a very different place and time.

Credo

"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me."

— John Paul Jones

"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature"

— George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."

— Edmund Burke

"Μολὼν λαβέ"

— Leonidas

"Blogito Ergo Sum"

— Neptunus Lex