Am I motivated by what I really want out of life - or am I mass-motivated?
It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.
. . . you have to learn where your pain is. You have to burrow down and find the wound, and if the burden of it is too terrible to shoulder, you have to shout it out; you have to shout for help. . . And then finally, the way through grief is grieving.
I feel like I don't have all the ingredients a person is supposed to have.
She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.
Is it love that connects us, is that what it is? I never knew that the feeling I have is regular old love because it's so-intricate. Perhaps there is another name for it, one we don't yet know. I used to think that love was simple and noticeable, like rain falling, so that just as you'd look at your skin and say Water, you would also wake in the morning and say Love. But it has been underneath, this new and old thing I feel, subterranean, silent and steady, like blood, rushing along and along without often making itself known.
From early on I valued the gift of memory above all others. I understood that as we grow older we carry a whole nation around inside of us, places and ways that have disappeared, believing that they are ours, that we alone hold the torch for our past, that we are as impenetrable as stone.
Wind buffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.
Gideon touched her cheek, lightly, with the tips of his fingers. “Did you know your name means ‘wisdom’? It was very well-given.
History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
An Englishman, Irishman and Scotsman were invited to a Christmas party. The Englishman brought a bag of tinsel, the Scotsman brought a bag of holly and they asked the Irishman: "What have you brought?" He said: "I brought a pair of knickers. " They asked: "What has that got to do with Christmas?" He said "They're Carol's. "