Mystic Two-by-Fours

I've taken some creative license with the phrase (borrowed from a friend)....but it's meant to be an expression of the principle that sometimes you are given the messages you need to receive in a somewhat abrupt and loud fashion...leaving little room to doubt from whence they come. (By the way, I'm having to type this one-handed as Smoochie, aka The Orange Menace, is curled up in my lap and on my left arm; also, if anyone is worried about staying warm this winter might I recommend a cat?)

Here are the quotes that drew my attention this week:

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. -- Calvin Coolidge

 "Here's a thing I think," she said, then paused as if to make sure that she found the most apt words. "Sometimes in life a thing happens, sometimes it's a person, and you know that what happens next and for some time, maybe for minutes or hours, will not be common, will not be just life moving on how it usually does. You know that those minutes or hours will be a gift of clarity; that the truth of the world will reveal itself if you care to look. Day after day, everything we see that seems real is only apparition, a ghost reality that we have conjured up in our self-delusion. Then the clarifying thing happens, and what you need to do, what you must do, is not question it, not demand more revelation than what is given, be quiet in the face of it, quiet and grateful that it has been given to you to see this, to be for even a short time aware of the extraordinary layered depths and profound beauty of the world to which we mostly blind ourselves." -- an excerpt from  Deeply Odd, Dean Koontz

My own version of "Where's Waldo"...where's Spike?

 And, lest I leave you thinking I'm being too serious, or metaphysical, or just downright weird (which, admittedly, I am), I leave you with this:

In fact, although it isn't profound, there are worse mottoes to live by than "We might as well eat." Say your neighbor's secret meth lab blows up, destroying your house along with his. We might as well eat. The secretary of defense announces from Sweden that he is having a sex-change operation, is in love with the prime minister of Russia, and has given his lover our nuclear launch codes. We might as well eat. -- an excerpt from  Deeply Odd, Dean Koontz

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Calvin Coolidge

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/calvincool414555.html#EsxMfMyYQ0VS5xPw.99