Tag Archives: books
Dash
I heard a Fly buzz – when I died By Emily Dickinson I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – The Stillness in the Room Was like the Stillness in the Air – Between the Heaves of Storm – The Eyes around – had wrung them dry – And Breaths were gathering firm …
Loneliness that Haunts
Excerpted from May This House Be Safe From Tigers, ©1959, by Alexander King: I find it very difficult to make any new friendships, mostly because the people I run into nowadays are full of imbecile ideas which tend to upset me. I’m too old and too busy with my own affairs to spend precious time …
Frankly, My Dear…
Excerpted from What Makes You Not a Buddhist ©2008, by Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche: If we could not be bought by praise or defeated by criticism, we would have incredible strength. We would be extraordinarily free, there would be no more unnecessary hopes and fears, sweat and blood and emotional reactions. We would finally be able …
Vaguely Amused
In this excerpt from May This House Be Safe From Tigers, ©1959, Alexander King discusses the defining trait of his native Austria, and how that helped him through a health crisis: First of all, let me solemnly assure you that I have never in all my life met a single really näive Austrian. In a …
Ent
I love the Ents. I’m not unhappy that they made movies based on LoTR, because that introduced a lot of people to the stories that would otherwise have never heard them, but I do miss the fan art. It’s hard, now, to find art based on imagination rather than the movies.
In a Holy Nutshell
Excerpted from Life of Pi by Yann Martel, © 2001: But religion is more than rite and ritual. There is what the rite and ritual stand for. Here too I am a Hindu. The universe makes sense to me through Hindu eyes. There is Brahman, the world soul, the sustaining frame upon which is woven, …
On to the next one!
I’m reading You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe, ©1940, and I’m at that horrible point where I’m not really enjoying it anymore, but I’ve invested so much time I hate to walk away without finishing it. He writes beautifully. The problem is that he hates everybody. I’m 165 pages in to a 744 …
Paging Dr. Schadenfreude
In Kurt Vonnegut’s book, TimeQuake, ©1997, there is a story-within-a-story. Vonnegut’s alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, pens a short story about a psychiatrist who only allows his patients to talk about other people: The name of the shrink was the name of the story, too, which was “Dr. Schadenfreude.” This doctor had his patients lie on the …
If this isn’t nice, what is?
Excerpted from my second-favorite Kurt Vonnegut book, TimeQuake, ©1997: “My uncle Alex Vonnegut, a Harvard-educated life insurance salesman who lived at 5033 North Pennsylvania Street, taught me something very important. He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it. “He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: …
And what had he learned?
Excerpted from You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe, ©1940: For he had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out– through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn …
Clear
“Do you have the patience to wait / till your mud settles and the water is clear?” ~Tao Te Ching, Chapter 15
