People are always asking me to do Shakespeare - at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It's like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It's great therapy.
Dear friends, have you begun to sing the "new song? " Loved ones are singing it in the heavenly home, and we may sing it here; and by and by we shall join them, gaze with them on the risen, glorified Lord, and our voices will mingle in the "new song" "unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood, to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever".
Whether we be young or old,Our destiny, our being's heart and home,Is with infinitude, and only there;With hope it is, hope that can never die,Effort and expectation, and desire,And something evermore about to be.
There is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and useful for life in later years than some good memory, especially a memory connected with childhood, with home.
One desire has been the ruling passion of my life. One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul. and sooner than that I should seek escape from the sacred necessity that is laid upon me, let the breath of life fail me. It is this: That in spite of all worldly opposition, God's holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school and in the State for the good of the people; to carve as it were into the conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which Bible and Creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to God
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicatied
Of dead and living, Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment . . .
Law and order is a social service. Crime and the fear which the threat of crime induces can paralyse whole communities, keep lonely and vulnerable elderly people shut up in their homes, scar young lives and raise to cult status the swaggering violent bully who achieves predatory control over the streets. I suspect that there would be more support and less criticism than today's political leaders imagine for a large shift of resources from Social Security benefits to law and order - as long as rhetoric about getting tough on crime was matched by practice.
I'd say our ability to supersize emotions are American-made special effects. In European countries, people mostly stay close to home and whatever rage there is simmers under the surface - it's what made the plays of Shakespeare and Harold Pinter so good.
I will never forget the feeling of walking into my home, a place that while drifting helpless in the middle of the Indian Ocean I wondered if I would ever see again.