"But Munro is an entirely different case, and she may be a singular author in that category for me: the time spent not reading her is as essential to my understanding of her work as the time spent immersed in her words."
"They say a house comes into its own when the weather gets rough; a house under siege from water, wind, snow, ice, becomes a poetry, the very thing that confirms your place in this world, despite what the world throws at you."
"We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know."
"I say this now to remind myself how words can squirt sideways, mute and mad; you think they are tools, or toys, or tame, and all at once they burn all your clothes off and you're standing there singed and ridiculous in the glare of the lightning."
"... a highly refined error is likely to keep us permanently estranged from truth, and will do so all the more readily in proportion as we find it difficult to realise that it is an error. One who thinks of conveying to mankind truths masked and rouged, may be truth’s pimp, but has never been truth’s lover" (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, quoted by Rosa Luxemburg, 'Socialism or Barbarism,' p. 250. @bookstodon#SundaySentence
"She won't buy into every complaint either; people simply like to whine, they like to overstate the dimensions of the crosses they bear so as to be taken seriously, and she can tell in a second if they're telling the truth or merely following the logic that a person just needs to be frustrated and penniless to seem honest."
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.”
― Gabriel García Márquez #SundaySentence
"It was good to chat, as people had done before the world grew so dire, and all contact had the quality of risk, and all the concatenated sorrows of the world seemed to drain away the pleasure of conversation from young people."
#SundaySentence is again from Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell
"... an image formed in Kit's mind of this huge smiling crowd that occupied all of Ontario, millions moving in unison, their eyes fixed on a brilliant future, children raised in those efficient government-built habitats ..."
#SundaySentence@bookstodon “Let us not forget that the reasons for human actions are usually incalculably more complex and diverse than we tend to explain them later, and are seldom clearly manifest.”
Fyodor #Dostoevsky, ‘The Idiot’ (Part IV, Chapter 3)
"There are hives all over the park where, right now, the bees would be crowding together to keep the temperature up, would be taking turns to be circled and warmed by all the other bees, would be tending to the year's future bees in their cells..."
"Harris prefers poetry above all else, for how it sets like concrete in his mind, as opposed to the short-acting fireworks of the novel, long, agonizing yarns concerning people and families he'll never know."