A WRITER WHO HAS MOVED ME

[Enkephalen]

Stephen King - for the ability to take the reader on a trip into total immersion in a story. Sharp characterizations, inventive story lines. The Stand and The Shining are two of my favorites.

 

[Loktar]

Never read Stephen King but the movie versions of It and The Langoliers was good.

 

[Cassie]

I was thinking about Stephen King, also. There are certain parts in many of his books that are brilliant. Lots of what he writes isn't moving at all, but there's almost always something, even if it's just a paragraph, that hits me.

 

[Enkephalen]

Balthasar Gracian's The Art of Worldly Wisdom (a 17th Century Jesuit Monk (see, Loktar, I'm not completely lost.) Here's a sample of his writings:

Be a person of integrity. Cling to righteousness with such tenacity of purpose that neither the passions of the mob nor the violence of the tyrant can ever cause you to transgress the bounds of right. But who can be such a phoenix of equity? What a scanty following rectitude has! Many praise it indeed, but few devote themselves. Others follow it until danger threatens; then the false deny it and the political conceal it. For righteousness cares not if it conflicts with friendship, power, or even self-interest; then comes the danger of desertion. Astute people make plausible distinctions so as not to stand in the way of their superiors or of reason of state. But straightforward and constant people regard deception as a kind of treason and set more store in tenacity than on sagacity. Such people are always to be found on the side of truth, and if they desert a group they do not change due to fickleness but because the others have first deserted truth.