Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[kennyc]

"We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif—books in piles on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are the boxes waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books. They are a sort of insulation, soundproofing some walls. They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables. The quantities and types of books are fluid, arriving like hysterical cousins in overnight shipping envelopes only to languish near the overflowing mail bench. Advance Reading Copies collect at beside, to be dutifully examined—to ignore them and read Henry James or Barbara Pym instead becomes a guilty pleasure. I can't imagine home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading The Aspern Papers, and there it is."
- Louise Erdrich (from Writers Almanac 6/7/2016)

[covingtoncat73]

Beautiful, Kenny. I love it.

“She felt the English were themselves to blame for her feelings. They had spent a century relentlessly marketing their detectives and wizards and nannies, and they had to live with the results.”


― Joe Hill, The Fireman

[covingtoncat73]

"There’s something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone always dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your children. Or your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.” ~Joe Hill, The Fireman

[covingtoncat73]

"and one should not crow over the defeat even of those who richly deserve to be defeated. That was dangerous, because then you yourself might get what you deserve for revelling in the misfortunes of another."
―Alexander McCall Smith, from "The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series Book 14)"

[covingtoncat73]

"Most human lives were and are too short. Most people have lived out their days hungry and barefoot, on the run from this war and that famine, a plague here and a flood there. But people have to sing anyway. Even a baby that hasn’t been fed in days will stop crying and look around when they hear someone singing in joy. You sing and it’s like giving a thirsty person water. It’s a kindness. It makes you shine."
Joe Hill, The Fireman

[kennyc]

"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born."

"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy."

- William Butler Yeats born on this date 6/13/1865

[covingtoncat73]

"Harper thought it would be a toss-up, which term for women she hated more: bitch or hen. A hen was something you kept in a cage, and her sole worth was in her eggs. A bitch, at least, had teeth." Joe Hill, The Fireman

[covingtoncat73]

"The fact that we continue to fall in love with people and ideas and places is not evidence of our cupidity or our dumbness, but our strength. When we love--really love--in any way, we are announcing to the world that we intend to survive."--Tennessee Williams/Interview with James Grissom/Photo of Tenn in Rome, 1947, by John Deakin

[covingtoncat73]

"Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open."
― from "Slade House: A Novel," David Mitchell

[kennyc]

Happy birthday today:

"Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read."
― Joyce Carol Oates

[AlexBell]

'Such are the hours when all that one has ever known or thought that is beautiful comes back softly and mysteriously; snatches of old songs, all one's first loves in poetry and in the phantasmagoria of nature. No sleep is sweeter than that into which one sinks in such a mood, when one's spirit drops anchor amidst the turbulence of the outward world, and the very power of the elements seems to shed stillness into the soul.'

Harriet Martineau, in Retrospect of Western Travel

[covingtoncat73]

"Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place."
Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)

[kennyc]

Being as the Summer Solstice just happened about 3 hours ago:

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Great Gatsby”

[covingtoncat73]

“But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained – an urn in daylight." ~Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

[covingtoncat73]

Happy is England! I could be content
To see no other verdure than its own;
To feel no other breezes than are blown
Through its tall woods with high romances blent:
Yet do I sometimes feel a languishment
For skies Italian, and an inward groan
To sit upon an Alp as on a throne,
And half forget what world or worldling meant.
Happy is England, sweet her artless daughters;
Enough their simple loveliness for me,
Enough their whitest arms in silence clinging:
Yet do I often warmly burn to see
Beauties of deeper glance, and hear their singing,
And float with them about the summer waters.

John Keats, 'Happy is England'