Where Books and Readers Come Together
“And my eyes resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her neck… I cried out with myself as I admired this deliberately unfinished sketch: ‘How lovely she is! What true nobility! It is indeed a proud Guermantes.’”
“The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him.”
“They seemed to me now no more than the purely subjective, impotent, illusory creations of my temperament.”
‘You can hear rumors,’ I said, ‘but you can’t know them.’
“Gaiman, the British writer, is a bit of a disappointment since much of his 2017 text has been found to closely resemble in structure and delivery (as you will soon see) many videos on Norse mythology posted on the video-sharing website called YouTube.”
“When I got to the sixth veil, I went over to the Shiva statue, simulated an orgasm, and cast myself to the ground while removing the seventh and final veil.”
“Maybe I am fated to always be alone, Tsukuru found himself thinking.”
“When I first started writing the novel, like twenty years ago, Laura had thrown caution to the winds and accepted a part in a local production of A Midsummer Nights Dream.”
A compendium of history, politics and religion since the dawn of the agrarian age in human civilization.
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Here is a hauntingly good reading of “This Moment is Your Life.”
One can sense the sheer joy words must have given Orwell when he describes his history with reading and writing, and it makes this reader all the more glad that such poetry can live in the hearts of men and women.
“A people without written language, without art, without homes, without love… Owning everything in common, even to your women and children, has resulted in your owning nothing in common.”
”The name Beowulf itself, ‘bee-wolf,’ apparently meaning bear, suggests affinities with a widely known folktale figure of prodigious strength, the Bear’s Son, the distribution of whose appearances, in North America as well as Eurasia, points to a background in that primordial cult of reverence for the bear discussed in Primitive Mythology, and which is still observed among the Ainus of Japan.”
For a National Book Award winner and a finalist for the 2008’s Pulitzer Prize, I expected much much more from Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke.
