We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure. Fondness for the ground comes back to a man after he has run the round of pleasure and business, eaten dirt, and sown wild oats, drifted about the world, and taken the wind of all its moods. The love of digging in the ground (or of looking on while he pays another to dig) is as sure to come back to him, as he is sure, at last, to go under the ground, and stay there.
You're a wizard," I snapped. "Can't you just use magic to make your own food?" "Ah, yes," he retorted. "Because mud pies are so very delicious and the wind fills empty stomachs quite nicely.
They teach anything in universities today. You can major in mud pies.
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
My husband is such a healthy eater. Except when it comes to sweets. He never consumes anything except fruit until noon. And then from noon on he might have some brown rice and some tofu, and then, come eight or nine at night, he orders three mud-pie double-chocolate pieces of cake and eats all three of them.
Both the forces of good and evil will keep the universe alive for us, until we awake from our dreams and give up this building of mud pies.
American feminism's nose dive began when Kate Millet, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies.
It is all very well to say that children are happier with mud pies and rag dolls than with these elaborate delights. There may be something in this theory, but when their amusements are carried to such a point of luxurious and imaginative perfection it certainly gives them great and even unlimited enjoyment at the time.
From the time I can first recall the rain falling on the red clay in Florida. I wanted to make things. When my brothers and sisters were making mud pies, I would be making ducks and chickens with the mud.
Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.
Life's dirty. Life's unclean you know. It's birth, it's sex, it's the intestinal tract. One big squishy, unsanitary mess. It never gets any cleaner either. You know, dust to dust, worms crawl in, worms crawl out, right Even though we know that, we still walk the walk, we still live the life. We're like a bunch of little kids. Little kids, you know, we jump in this big old pond of mud and we're slapping it all over our face, rubbing our hair all down our backs and we're making these glorious, gooey, mud pies. That's us.
Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.
One can derive the same fun from print-making as from making mud pies and great subtlety can be achieved through the use of transparent inks, half-tone screens and even accidental colour combinations, which is often where the art hides.
... to paint with oil paints for the first time ... is like trying to make something exquisitely accurate and microscopically clear out of mud pies with boxing gloves on.
or simply:
