Quote of the Day (Francois Mauriac, on Winter in the French Countryside)

“Winter in the country among the fields does not have any of the cloistered or even shrouded feeling I had imagined. The countryside in no way reminds one of animals that hibernate until the spring. Everything stays awake. The smell of the buds betrays a snap in gestation. The comradeship of hunger unites the birds who give no thought to love. Every morning, a pipit flies against my bedroom window and pecks at it furiously. I see her soft yellow breast from close at hand. She is not trying to get in, because the open window does not attract her. Is she, like the lark, tempted by the mirror, obsessed by the mystery of the transparent?”—French novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Francois Mauriac (1885-1970), “On Nature,” in Second Thoughts: Reflections on Literature and on Life (1961)