After-Orts #39

Human Nature cannot bear Prosperity. It invariably intoxicates Individuals and Nations. Adversity is the great Reformer. Affliction is the purifying furnace. Prosperity has thrown our dear America into an easy trance for 30 years. The dear delights of Riches and Luxury have drowned all her intellectual and physical Energies.
     —John Adams, in a letter to his son, John Quincy Adams, October 1814


A company report or a newspaper leader might be published in blank verse and, so long as the lay-out was a prose one, nobody would notice the metre. A sentence in a Victorian mathematical work ran something like this: "It may seem at first unlikely that the pull of gravity will depress the centre of a light cord, held horizontally at a high lateral tension; and yet no force, however great, can stretch a cord, however fine, into a horizontal line that shall be absolutely straight." It was years before someone discovered that the second part of the sentence was a perfect In Memoriam rhymed stanza.
      -- Robert Graves, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, chapter 3


Anglo-Saxon was the language of the belly; Norman-French, that of the heart-- the Normans had learned to have hearts since they had settled in France; Latin, that of the brain. English, as Chaucer used it, was a reconciliation of the functions of all these organs. But in Chaucer's as in all the best English prose, the belly rules: English is a practical language.
     -- ibid., chapter 5


I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate to the left or right, the readers will most certainly go into it.
     -- C. S. Lewis, responding to an interviewer's question, May 7, 1963:
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/c-s-lewiss-advice-on-writing-well/