Fanatics and Humor

For fanatics choose a part and parade it as though it were the whole, as the history of heresy illustrates. Factionalism is humourless.

But the saints are never the kind of killjoy spinster aunts who go in for faultfinding and lack all sense of humour...For humour is a mysterious but unmistakable charism inseparable from Catholic faith, and neither the ‘progressives’ nor the ‘integralists’ seems to possess it—the latter even less than the former. Both of these tend to be faultfinders, malicious satirists, grumblers, carping critics, full of bitter scorn, know-it-alls who think they have the monopoly of infallible judgement; they are self-legitimising prophets—in short, fanatics.

—Hans Urs von Balthasar (1974) quoted in Philip McCosker, "Blessed Tension: Barth and Von Balthasar on the Music of Mozart" (2005)

"The world happening anew"

Using in one tongue the word for a thing in the other makes the attributes of both resound: if you say Give me fire when they say Give me a light, what is not to be learned about fire, light and the act of giving? It's not another way of saying things: these are new things. The world happening anew, Makina realizes: promising other things, signifying other things, producing different objects. Who knows if they'll last, who knows if these names will be adopted by all, she thinks, but there they are, doing their damnedest.

—Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (2009, trans. L. Dillman 2015)