Me and Catherine Morland - Out at the ball game

My eldest son begins his very first little league baseball season today. Compared to other boys today, his age is quite advanced for a beginner - he's already NINE. What an old man, in baseball years.

In honor of the two games he'll play this weekend and the subsequent lack of reading I'll be doing, here's my all-time favorite baseball literary quote. (Incidentally, it may also be the very first)

...it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, baseball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books  

- from the opening paragraphs of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

How I love Catherine Morland! How we all love Henry Tilney!

Lovely Chapter 14

Chapter 14 of Northanger Abbey holds two of my very favorite Jane Austen quotes.  So much brilliance in one little chapter!

Catherine takes a walk in the country with Mr. and Miss Tilney.  First they discuss novels.  Surely Mr. Tilney does not like novels as Catherine does.  He has more important things to read.  Mr. Tilney answers thus:

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."

I pull this one out of my brain to use against people as often as possible.

Also, this one:

"A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can."

Folks unfamiliar with Austen assume that her writing is stiff, archaic, formal.  This last line proves what I love best about her.  When her tongue is planted in cheek, she is at her best. To me, she is as valuable for her wit as she is for her romance.

More wine!

From Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey: 

"There is not the hundredth part of the wine consumed in this kingdom that there ought to be." - John Thorpe

And there we have the one and only admirable thought spoken by John Thorpe in the entire novel.