The Friday 56

I found this via my lovely wife's blog of randomness and she found it on Shiloh Walker's blog who found it at The Bookaholic Zone who got it from Storytime With Tonya & Friends which, as far as we can tell, seems to be the originator.

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Rules:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence (plus one or two others if you like) along with these instructions on your blog or (if you do not have your own blog) in the comments section of this blog.
* Post a link along with your post back to this blog.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

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Since most of reading is done on the Sony PRS-505 my wife got me two Christmases ago, I don't always have a physical book on hand for this.  But one of my near-future projects is to apply the bookmarks from my well-worn copy of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (my favorite of his books) that Memaw bought for me many years ago to my digital copy so I can quickly find my favorite quotes.  Thus I actually have a non-electronic non-gaming book close at hand for a change.  So without further ado, here is my Friday 56 of Connecticut Yankee:

I could have given my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian without any trouble, but that would have been to affront a law of human nature: spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose color and shape and size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it; and besides I was afraid of the united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty, and paralysis to human thought.

Wow.  And I thought my sentences were long.  It just makes it that much funnier later when he comments on Sandy's "horizonless transcontinental sentences" (page 148 in my unabridged Aerie edition).