Scarecrow gems:

"My life has been so short that I really know nothing whatever. I was only made day before yesterday. What happened in the world before that time is all unknown to me."

"Of course I cannot understand it," he said. "If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains."

"'Certainly; that is why I know it,' returned the Scarecrow. 'If it required brains to figure it out, I never should have said it.'"

The Scarecrow is wonderfully, blithely sarcastic.

"Dorothy did not know what to say to this, for all the people seemed to think her a witch, and she knew very well she was only an ordinary little girl who had come by the chance of a cyclone into a strange land."

Art by Alexis Vivallo

"The Witch gave Dorothy a friendly little nod, whirled around on her left heel three times, and straightway disappeared, much to the surprise of little Toto, who barked after her loudly enough when she had gone, because he had been afraid even to growl while she stood by.

But Dorothy, knowing her to be a witch, had expected her to disappear in just that way, and was not surprised in the least."

By the way, in the book, the shoes are silver, not red.

I thought that I would like to do a selection of passages from the Wizard of Oz. Perhaps it is an odd idea, yet I feel that certain sections, while not necessarily "quote-worthy", call to mind for me my memories of the story - not the movie, but reading the original series as a child. I am realizing more and more how profoundly the series as a whole impacted my imagination. In some ways I still see emerald vistas and cloud stairways, sawhorses and patchwork girls.

"All the same," said the Scarecrow, "I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one."

"I shall take the heart," returned the Tin Woodman; "for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world."

~ The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum, originally published in  1900

But what is worship? To do the will of God. That is worship. And what is the will of God? To do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me. That is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his. Ergo, I must turn idolator.

- Melville, Moby Dick

Supplication, 2005, by J Swofford

"I'll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy." 

~ Ishmael, Moby Dick, Herman Melville, 1851

A good man can be honest in any type of skin. - Melville, Moby Dick