Merton Quotes
Paul Merton (on the subject of people wearing bow-ties): People wear bow-ties because it's show-business, isn't it? I mean there's Bernard Manning there. I mean, obviously he is in show-business, and Neil Hamilton desperately would like to be in show-business. But that's the idea isn't it?
Linda Smith
... If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."
"Why?" cried Merton amused. "Do you think people dislike cheerfulness?"
"People like frequent laughter," answered Father Brown, "but I don't think they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a very trying thing.
G. K. Chesterton
On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes.
A. N. Wilson
"Sixty years ago Catholics played a prominent, prestigious, and irreplaceable part in American literary culture...They included established fiction writers--Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Julien Green, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O'Connor, Henry Morton Robinson, and Caroline Gordon. (Sociologist Father Andrew Greeley had yet to try his formidable hand at fiction.)...also science fiction and detective writers such as Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, August Delerth, and Walter Miller, Jr."...in American poetry...Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, and the Berrigan brothers, Ted and Daniel.... There were even Catholic haiku poets, notably Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio" (15-16).
Dana Gioia
