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.’”
“I hope that a Wende for better times will take place.”
“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).
The Masks of God: Vol. II, Oriental Mythology (1962) by Joseph Campbell is again one of those marathons of the mind.
”The Constitutional Rebellion of 1905-1911 forced the weak Qajar dynasty to agree to Iran’s first constitution and parliament. Foreshadowing the 1979 revolution, the revolt was launched by the same powerful troika–the clergy, bazaar merchants, and the intelligentsia–that would come together again later in the century. Their goal was to curtail the monarchy’s power.”
