I love reading about the lives of the Inklings—the 20th century group of Oxford eccentrics. Some time ago I came across this website of quotes culled from two seprate devotional books collected by Charles WIlliams. Since I added the feed to my RSS Reeder, the snippets act like the best kind of desk calendar full of dank quotes each new day. Here’s two Pentacost Sunday gems:

A gift is properly an unreturnable giving … hence it is manifest that love has the nature of a first gift, through which all free gifts are given. So since the Holy Ghost proceeds as Love, He proceeds as the first gift. Gift … is the proper name of the Holy Ghost.

Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica.

The Holy Ghost is He whereby the Begotten is loved by the One begetting and love His Begetter.

St. Augustine: On the Trinity.

“The Thought Fox”

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

—Ted Hughes