Book Excerpts

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  • OffSheGoes35OffSheGoes35 Posts: 3,487
    From Theft By Finding: Diaries 1977-2002 by David Sedaris:

    August 2, 1981
    Raleigh

      Ronnie is incensed over the 
    royal wedding. "Did you know 
    that silkworms spun the fabric
    for her dress?"
      "Silkworms spin everyone's
    silk," I told her. "That's where
    silk comes from."
      Somewhere she heard that
    four hundred bears were killed
    and turned into hats.We went to
    the movies, and all I thought the
    entire time was Where on earth
    does she get her information
    from?  
  • OffSheGoes35OffSheGoes35 Posts: 3,487
    edited April 2018
    Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare
    "Don Quixote and the Ambiguity of Reading" by Ben Okri

        'I have read books backwards and inside out. I
    began reading Ovid in the middle and then to the 
    end and then from the beginning. I once read every
    other sentence of a book I knew well and then went
    back and read the sentences I missed out. We are
    all children in the art of reading. We assume there
    is only one way to read a book. But a book read in 
    a new way becomes a different book.'
         I felt he was reading me as he spoke.
        'And you have the nerve to tell me I am reading 
    slowly. Part of the trouble with our world, my snooty
    young friend, is that the art of reading is almost dead.
    Reading is the secret of life. We read the world poorly,
    because we read poorly. Everything is reading. You are 
    trying to read me now.'
    Post edited by OffSheGoes35 on
  • OffSheGoes35OffSheGoes35 Posts: 3,487
    edited April 2018
    C'mon brianlux , you know you want to post some excerpts!

    Post edited by OffSheGoes35 on
  • brianluxbrianlux Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 40,592
    C'mon brianlux , you know you want to post some excerpts!




    I'm thinkin', I'm thinkin' :lol:
    “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
    Variously credited to Mark Twain or Edward Abbey.













  • brianluxbrianlux Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 40,592
    OK, here we go...

         "Since I was eight or so, I had been internalizing the written words of persons who had seen and felt things new to me instead of, 'aye-eem, aye-eem, aye-eem.'  The world dropped away when I did it.  When I read an absorbing book, my pulse and respiration rate slowed down perceptibly, just as though I were doing TM.
         I was already a veteran meditator.  When I awoke from my Western-style meditation I was often a wiser human being.  And I tell this story because so many people nowadays regard printed pages as nothing more than obsolescent technology, first developed by the Chinese two thousand years ago.  Books came into being, surely, as practical schemes for transmitting  or storing information, no more romantic in Gutenberg's time than a computer in ours.  So it happens though- a wholly unforeseen accident- that the feel and appearance of a book when combined with a literate person in a straight chair can create a spiritual condition of priceless depth and meaning."

    -Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death, p.188
      
    “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
    Variously credited to Mark Twain or Edward Abbey.













  • Halifax2TheMaxHalifax2TheMax Posts: 36,477
    Anyone heard about Comey’s book? Got an excerpt? Maybe something from Art of the Deal instead?

    Kurt Vonnegut is the balls.
    09/15/1998 & 09/16/1998, Mansfield, MA; 08/29/00 08/30/00, Mansfield, MA; 07/02/03, 07/03/03, Mansfield, MA; 09/28/04, 09/29/04, Boston, MA; 09/22/05, Halifax, NS; 05/24/06, 05/25/06, Boston, MA; 07/22/06, 07/23/06, Gorge, WA; 06/27/2008, Hartford; 06/28/08, 06/30/08, Mansfield; 08/18/2009, O2, London, UK; 10/30/09, 10/31/09, Philadelphia, PA; 05/15/10, Hartford, CT; 05/17/10, Boston, MA; 05/20/10, 05/21/10, NY, NY; 06/22/10, Dublin, IRE; 06/23/10, Northern Ireland; 09/03/11, 09/04/11, Alpine Valley, WI; 09/11/11, 09/12/11, Toronto, Ont; 09/14/11, Ottawa, Ont; 09/15/11, Hamilton, Ont; 07/02/2012, Prague, Czech Republic; 07/04/2012 & 07/05/2012, Berlin, Germany; 07/07/2012, Stockholm, Sweden; 09/30/2012, Missoula, MT; 07/16/2013, London, Ont; 07/19/2013, Chicago, IL; 10/15/2013 & 10/16/2013, Worcester, MA; 10/21/2013 & 10/22/2013, Philadelphia, PA; 10/25/2013, Hartford, CT; 11/29/2013, Portland, OR; 11/30/2013, Spokane, WA; 12/04/2013, Vancouver, BC; 12/06/2013, Seattle, WA; 10/03/2014, St. Louis. MO; 10/22/2014, Denver, CO; 10/26/2015, New York, NY; 04/23/2016, New Orleans, LA; 04/28/2016 & 04/29/2016, Philadelphia, PA; 05/01/2016 & 05/02/2016, New York, NY; 05/08/2016, Ottawa, Ont.; 05/10/2016 & 05/12/2016, Toronto, Ont.; 08/05/2016 & 08/07/2016, Boston, MA; 08/20/2016 & 08/22/2016, Chicago, IL; 07/01/2018, Prague, Czech Republic; 07/03/2018, Krakow, Poland; 07/05/2018, Berlin, Germany; 09/02/2018 & 09/04/2018, Boston, MA; 09/08/2022, Toronto, Ont; 09/11/2022, New York, NY; 09/14/2022, Camden, NJ; 09/02/2023, St. Paul, MN;

    Libtardaplorable©. And proud of it.

    Brilliantati©
  • OffSheGoes35OffSheGoes35 Posts: 3,487
    I knew you would choose a good one, brianlux.  :)
       
           At first, the tired body takes over completely.
    As on shipboard, one descends into a deck-chair
    apathy. One is forced against one's mind, against 
    all tidy resolutions, back into the primeval rhythms
    of the seashore. Rollers on the beach, wind in the 
    pines, the slow flapping of herons across sand dunes,
    drown out the hectic rhythms of city and suburb, time 
    tables and schedules. One falls under their spell,
    relaxes, stretches out prone. One becomes, in fact,
    like the element on which one lies, flattened by the
    sea; bare, open, empty as the beach, erased by today's
    tides of all yesterday's scribblings.
           And then, some morning in the second week, the 
    mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense---no---
    but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in 
    gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach.
    One never knows what chance treasures these easy
    unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white
    sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone,
    what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channelled
    whelk, a moon shell or even an argonaut.
           But it must not be sought for or---heaven forbid!---
    dug for. No, no dredging of the sea bottom here. That 
    would defeat one's purpose. The sea does not reward
    those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient.
    To dig for treasures shows not only impatience and greed,
    but lack of faith. Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea
    teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open,
    choiceless as a beach---waiting for a gift from the sea.

    -Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
  • brianluxbrianlux Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 40,592
    ^^^Nice one, OSG!
    “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
    Variously credited to Mark Twain or Edward Abbey.













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