Where Books and Readers Come Together
“The Bible in our Chinese Religion of good citizenship says: ‘Do not go against what is right to get the praise of the people. Do not trample upon the wishes of the people to follow your own desires.’”
The Master said, “The wise are never perplexed. The humane never suffer from vexation. The brave are never afraid.”
“It’s not even accurate to call it the past, for the events related in these pages didn’t occur in the past. The details that have been preserved are already abundant. Sealed in floating bottles, they will hopefully reach the new universe and endure there.”
“And he remembered as one remembers a dream long past how O-lan rested from her work a little while and fed the child richly and the white rich milk ran out of her breast and spilled upon the ground. And this seemed too long past ever to have been.”
“But lately, don’t ask why, I’ve no taste for comedy, no inclination to exercise, even if I had the space, no delight in fire or earth, in words that once revealed a golden world of majestical stars, the beauty of poetic apprehension, the infinite joy of reason.”
“The big question in my mind is not if your mom is coming back. It’s if Pete is, and if I’ll get a chance at having someone like you.”
“Maybe I am fated to always be alone, Tsukuru found himself thinking.”
“Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society” (p 12).
“She was intoxicated by her brilliant, crimson dream until a bullet pierced her chest.”
“Well, to me, that’s what love is. Not that anyone can understand me, though.”
A short story
“Recovery, in all its varied forms, is simply a human instinct.”
“To travel through Sichuan countryside is to feel the history, the years of work that have shaped the land, the sheer weight of humanity on patches of earth that have been worked in the same way for centuries.”
Holden is a grieving young man unable to cope with his brother’s death and much like Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury, we watch a sixteen-year-old Holden as he indirectly contemplates suicide over the course of a few days.
The Masks of God: Vol. II, Oriental Mythology (1962) by Joseph Campbell is again one of those marathons of the mind.
