People who have a “freshness of appreciation” repeatedly, though not continuously, experience awe, pleasure, and wonder in their everyday world. They are able to stop walking down the street and all of a sudden appreciate the vertical symmetry of skyscrapers that line up vertically in one’s field of vision.
If we are imprisoned in ourselves, books provide us with the means of escape. If we have run too far away from ourselves, books show us the way back.
Hi, everyone.
A character has a distinctive voice - you should be able to hear them in your head and conduct a conversation with them while you're out walking. If the answers surprise you, you know it's the character speaking and not you.
Now that hunting season is in full swing… the Brave Warriors emerge from the trees!
Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil. The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
Did you ever have one of those days where you just want to sit at home, drink coffee, mellow out, drink coffee, turn some Tears For Fears down real low, talk to the cat a bit… muse upon life?
My fascination was instantaneous, but my realization of WHY, was not.
I just love the look and the feel of this newest edition, published by Scribners. And even the typeface, I mean the actual print, the font that is used… I love it. And the paper itself. And the smell. Scribners can really make a nice book. OK, I am saying all of this preamble to just mention that I am now really interested in reading the thing.
For a long while now I have been in the process of writing a book about my dad. He succumbed to a lengthy battle with congestive heart failure, and passed away on Dec.13th, 1999. I have several chapters of the book completed, but a long ways to go yet. It is, hmmm… how can I put this, a "severely procrastinated labor of love."
“Where was it,” thought Raskolnikov, “where was it I read about a man sentenced to death who, one hour before his execution, says or thinks that if he had to live on some high rock, on a cliff, on a ledge so narrow that there was only room enough for him to stand there, and if there were bottomless chasms all round, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, and eternal gales, and if he had to spend all his life on that square yard of space – a thousand years, an eternity – he’d rather live like that man than die at once! Oh, only to live, live, live! Live under any circumstances – only to live.”
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such allieviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.
Well, it is a night for basic witchery and all-out goblinry!
There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery. 
I am currently reading an absolutely fascinating book, Alain de Botton’s, The Architecture of Happiness.
Recently I finished reading an excellent book.
Everything about the coloration is perfect.
The only winnable nuclear war is the one we prevent.
She stole it from someone else, and now I myself am stealing this little meme-game from Dorothy’s current blog, and the instructions are as follows:
The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.
Today’s Splash du Jour has had me thinking about Steinbeck. I love his stuff.
I wonder if I will ever be this famous for my literary achievements…
If I am ever lying on my death bed, having lost the will to live, just bring me a kitten. 
When it comes to the topic of “Books I Have Been Thinking About Reading But Not Actually Reading” right at the top of the List would have to be this one… Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
Apparently we are now living, in America, in what is referred to as the Post-Torture Era. Which, being interpreted, might possibly mean that if we need to torture you, we will use a post!
I am reading a book but not buying it.
Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
The title of this blog is actually a plea.
The problem with religion – as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology – is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.
Part of a reader's job is to find out why certain writers endure. This may require some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to have an opinion about a book and reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal lets you see reading as something that might move or delight you. You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading. I'm not saying you shouldn't read such writers, some of whom are excellent and deserving of celebrity. I'm only pointing out that they represent the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written.
Just the other day… no wait, let me state the following disclaimer → What you are about to read may be rather difficult to believe.
Just tonight I picked up Alice Munro’s hot-off-the-presses book of short stories, [The View From Castle Rock] and read the first one. It is terrific writing, and really memoir-ish. Having recently read Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder, I note that both of these veteran authors have come out in 2006 with very memoir-laden fictive reminiscive-ish stuff.
I have, all my life long, been lying till noon; yet I tell all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does not rise early will ever do any good.
Detested sport, 
I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice, sorrow that was dumb… Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility. It is the last thing left in me, and the best; the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting point for a fresh development.
Just thought I would pop on by to say a few words about a truly excellent book I have recently read. Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth.
When I see my friend after a long time, my first question is, Has anything become clear to you?
One of my favorite poets, is Rupert Brooke.
Thick, wavy hair. Lamp-lit blue eyes. With the outbreak of World War 1, he was commissioned in England's Royal Navy, and took part in a disastrous expedition at Antwerp which ended in retreat.
An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it is also more nourishing.
There is in every village a torch – the teacher: 
