Where Books and Readers Come Together
“He seemed as he stood there to see all his age, its tumultuous life, its iron certainties and rigid conventions, its repressed emotion and facetious humor, its cautious science and incautious religion, its corrupt politics and immutable castes, as the great hidden enemy of all his deepest yearnings.”
“It had rained Saturday night, but the rain had dwindled to a stop before dawn, and across the river, above and beyond the belfry and steeple, the green whaleback of Monadnock was wreathed in gossamer wisps of fog.”
“And then, on Christmas Eve, a miracle occurred: Ting-Pei Warren, the Judeo-Christian Buddhist cat, high on catnip and tuna water, silently scaled the six-foot spruce while her family sat by the fire, making short work of a pecan-encrusted cheese log. The three of us turned just in time to see her, a silver star atop the highest bough. And just in time to see her lose her balance and take the entire tree down with her.”
“I want to tell you a story. This story is about the man you’re named after and about the woman who looked after you early in your life and about the man she called her American son.”
“There are wells, deep wells, dug in our hearts. Birds fly over them.”
A compendium of history, politics and religion since the dawn of the agrarian age in human civilization.
“A riveting study of humanity.”
“Go away, the old buildings said. There is no place for you here. You are not wanted. We have secrets.”
“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.”
“A man’s Dream is his personal myth.”
“Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.”
“There are places in the world where nothing ever happens, and Time stops moving altogether.”
“She was a stone-faced statue when Horace shut the door and locked it. He walked down the hall, locked the door to the front of the chamber, went upstairs, and made himself some bacon and eggs for breakfast.”
“They could not feel my anguish nor see the concern in my eyes. They would wake up in the morning as if nothing had happened and make their breakfasts and go to work or school or take care of their children as if the day were like any other. But it wouldn’t be, and I knew it, regardless of what greeted me ahead.”
