"The problem of self-identity is not just a problem for the young. It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no longer does it should tell you that you are dead."

-----Norman Maclean, from the unpublished preface to "Young Men and Fire"

"God is so beautiful, and so patient, and so loving, and so generous that he is the heart and soul and rock of every love and every kindness and every gladness in the world. All the beauty in the world and in the hearts of men, all the painting all the poetry all the music, all the architecture comes out of his heart first. He is so loveable that no heart can know how loveable he is - can know only in part. When the best loves God best, he does not love him nearly as he deserves, or as he will love him in time."

------George MacDonald
(From a letter to his daughter Mary when she was sixteen)

"It's what they keep telling you in church. Women are all heart and men are all body. I don't know who's supposed to have the brains. God, I suppose.
Eccles smiles, wondering if the Lutheran church gives everyone such ideas. Luther himself was a little like this, perhaps----overstating half-truths in a kind of comic wrath. The whole black Protestant paradox-thumping maybe begins there. Helpless, predestined Man, the king of Creation. Utterly fallen: a hubris in shoving the particular aside. Maybe: he's forgotten most of the theology they made him absorb."

"Harry is happy to go to Eccles' church. Not merely out of uneasy affection for Eccles, though there's that; but because he considers himself happy, lucky, blessed, forgiven, and wants to give thanks. His feeling that there is an unseen world is instinctive, and more of his actions than anyone suspects constitute transactions with it."

"Harry has no taste for the dark, tangled, visceral aspect of Christianity, the 'going through' quality of it, the passage into death and suffering that redeems and inverts these things, like an umbrella blown inside out. He lacks the mindful will to walk the straight line of paradox. His eyes turn toward the light however it catches his retinas."

-----excerpts from "Rabbit Run" by John Updike

My review of the Coen Brother's Movies. "Do it my way, or watch your butts."

Movie Year Grade

Blood Simple 1984 A-
Crimewave 1985 n/a
Raising Arizona 1987 A
Miller's Crossing 1990 A
Barton Fink 1991 A+
The Hudsucker Proxy 1994 B
Fargo 1996 B+
The Big Lebowski 1998 A
O Brother, Where Art Thou 2000 A
The Man Who Wasn't There 2001 A-