Pieces of my favorite books

I love this book. It's the real life story of the Sound of Music, and it is so much better. Maria writes with humor and optimism. Her courage day to day & the things she never thinks to even complain about in her recounting amazes and encourages me. They landed in the States with $4 and 12 people to feed some how. It's one of those lovely history books that lets you step into someone else's shoes in another time and another place and really see the world as you never could otherwise. Every time I read this book I laugh out loud again and again. Another reason I love it is the insight it gives to being a successful wife and mother. It can be hard to find these accounts, because often these women are behind the scenes.
-The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp
"I invented a method all my own, in which I wanted to apply what I had learned about one word to as many like-sounding words as I could find. This proved later to be fatally wrong, and it still haunt my English of today. For instance, I had learned: freeze-frozen. I wrote underneath in my precious little notebook: "squeeze-squozen" and "sneeze-snozen" Proudly I talked about someone being a "thunkard", explaining wordily that I had thought if drinking much makes a person a drunkard, so thinking much, like that professor I had in mind makes him a "thunkard." When I admired the tall "hice" in New York, I got quite offended because they seemed to overlook the logical similarity between "mouse-mice" and "house-hice" I talked about the reet of my teeth, feeling perfectly correct in doing so. Wasn't it "foot -feet" after all?"

"Especially is it bad if you translate the Bible literally. The effect was tremendous when I informed a group of people with whom I had come to talk in the lobby, that: "the ghost was willing, but the meat was soft."