my favorite blue hoodie: 2013

Sunday, September 8, 2013

A Selection of Quotes I've Enjoyed Recently

Handwriting is the first physical way we learned to write. Hand connected to arm, to shoulder, to heart.

Natalie Goldberg

The True Secret of Writing

pg. xi

I loved the wild warmth of the North Atlantic, the deep shaggy woods, the wry sense of humor of the people up there, and the feel of the air by the ocean - clean and briny, fresh and bracing.

Kate Christensen

Blue Plate Special

pg. 249

I see how the division plays out everywhere, how this early destructive mutation of the family, just like that of a cancer cell, determines the psychic and social patterns of our existence. The world seems to be constructed on empires born of these mutations - of poor pitted against poor, ethnic group against ethnic group, elevating one group over another - a seduction that keeps the powerful in place. What if we weren't so susceptible to being the adored, the most, the cherished, the winner?

Eve Ensler

In The Body Of The World

pg. 138-139

Its magic was of the kind books possess when they come into our lives at the right moment to show us what we need to learn.

Melissa Coleman

This Life Is In Your Hands

pg. 21

We didn't have a connection to God in the traditional sense, but rather a spiritual reverence for nature. We appreciated the power of the sun to germinate our crops, the rain to keep them growing, the beauty of a sunrise, the glory of the sea sparking with diamonds. Each found his or her own sources of wonder and mystery in the unfolding of the universe, without the guarantees and assurances that church provided. This life was the priority, and in the effort to survive we didn't worry about what would happen afterwards.

Melissa Coleman

This Life Is In Your Hands

pg. 185

Sunday, July 21, 2013

A Selection of Quotes That I've Enjoyed Recently

Its people are the unmapped attractions of Ireland.

Niall Williams & Christine Breen

The Pipes Are Calling

pg. 178

This was a beach at the beginning of the world, I thought. For here on these printless windblown sands was the untouched wild beauty of the earth and sea, unspoiled. This is what Ireland offers. The power and peace of this kind of beauty is more inspiring than anything.

Niall Williams & Christine Breen

The Pipes Are Calling

pg. 213

The body is an organ of memory, holding traces of all our experiences. The land, too, carries the burden of all its changes. To truly see and understand a landscape is to see its depth as well as its smooth surfaces, its beauty and its scars.

Kristen Iversen

Full Body Burden

pg. 338

One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they'll elude you by hiding in improbable places: in a box full of old picture frames, say, or in the laundry basket, wrapped in a sweatshirt. But at other times they'll confront you, and you'll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn't thought about in weeks or years. I often seen electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me feel, but I can't feel them. They are all soul with no flesh, no texture, and no weight. They can get in your head but can't whack you upside it.

Will Schwalbe

The End of Your Life Book Club

pg. 42-43

In an era of computers, there's something deeply poignant about a political prisoner with his scraps of paper, about a prison convulsed in the hunt for a pen, and about [Karen] Connelly's recognition of the importance of the written and printed word. It's easy to forget in our wired world that there are not just places like prisons where electronic text is forbidden, but whole countries, like Burma, where an unregistered modem will land you in jail or worse. Freedom can still depend on ink, just as it always has.

Will Schwalbe

The End of Your Life Book Club

pg. 132

There are all kinds of serendipities in bookstores, starting with Alphabetical: while looking for one novel, you might remember that you'd always meant to read something by another author whose last name shared the first two letters. Visual: the shiny jacket on this book might catch your eye. Accidental: superstitiously, I almost always feel the need to buy any book that I knock over. And Prompted: both Mom and I gave very serious consideration to any book placed in the "staff recommends" section, particularly if it sported a yellow stickie (aka Post-it note) or a handwritten shelf talker - a bookstore neologism I love, because it conjures such a vivid image of a shelf talking to you, or of a person who talks to shelves.

Will Schwalbe

The End of Your Life Book Club

pb. 140

Saturday, May 25, 2013

A Selection of Quotes that I've Enjoyed Recently

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason we are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

Louise Erdrich

It makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore, with a vista open to eternity, you'll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city.

Claire Messud

The Woman Upstairs

pg. 16

We were overwhelmed by the enormity of the tasks ahead. Mary had given us a bottle of milk and a spoonful of loose tea, and so, unable to decide what to do, we did what all Irish men and women do: we had tea.

Niall Williams & Christine Breen

O Come Ye Back to Ireland

pg. 13

You can get a feeling in parts of the West of Ireland that you are the first man and first woman anywhere. You come upon places so remote and mystifying, so wind-lashed and sea-tossed, so rocky or so green they overwhelm your senses. Nature fills the silence with the crash and foaming of Atlantic waves, the shrill crying of seabirds, the flapping of different winds meeting amid the mountains. It makes you aware of your littleness, quietening you in a way nothing else can. When you come upon one of these places you never want to leave; and yet you want to leave suddenly, to shout out, to share with the world the place that has become part of you.

Niall Williams & Christine Breen

O Come Ye Back to Ireland

pg. 217

On the clear silver-frosted nights of November, the very air of evening sparkled with crispness. Gathering hurried armfuls of turf from the haybarn, I felt the shimmering cold of the stars themselves in the night sky. So little is ever said of the skies of Ireland, and yet between the majestic cloudscapes - bruised blue-gray thunderheads, mists and fogs of every variety, scudding lighter-than-light fluff balls, strands and veils and sweeps and sprawls of cloud - and the moony, starry night skies over bog and mountain, it is so much a part of landscape.

Niall Williams & Christine Breen

When Summer's In The Meadow

pg. 134-135

In the old blue Peugeot, thinking music and talking weather, we took our favorite road from Kiltumper - westwards to the ocean, then north by the rocks at Quilty. Driving by the edge of the Atlantic, the roads were so empty and sea-swept they seemed to run precariously along some middle world, a salty misted winter's place between land and sea. This was the west of Ireland, and here upon the western edge of Clare, as much as in the magical counties of Kerry and Connemara, Sligo, and Donegal, the shape and feel of the landscape evoked that special feeling that was all wildness and wind, a kind of tossed and solitary beauty that staggered and silenced the heart even as you drove through it.

Niall Williams & Christine Breen

When Summer's In The Meadow

pg. 178-179