“Books are solitudes in which we meet.” ~ Rebecca Solnit, from “Ice”
Friday evening. Cloudy and very cold, 27 degrees.
Hello. Long time no write.
Well, it has not been an auspicious first half of February. The never-ending migraine starts and stops and starts and stops, and sitting in front of this screen is well nigh impossible. It’s not that my post draft folder isn’t full to overflowing; unfortunately, it’s that I just can’t do this as much as I want to because of the whole eye pain issue.
Anyway, I don’t really have a leftovers post in the form in which I normally post one, but I do have this little tidbit for you quote collectors out there. I’m only including a few in this post. Click on the link to see all of them. I think it’s a great selection. Hope you enjoy.
More later (sooner, I hope). Peace.
The 40 Most Powerful Literary Quotes
An irresistible page-turner is a wonderful thing, but the very greatest novels pack sentences so prevailing that you stop reading, lower the book and simply live in the words for a moment. Here we pay tribute our 40 most powerful sentences in novels.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Year: 1985
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
Don Quixote
Author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Year: 1605
“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”
And Yet the Books
And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are,” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,
Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.
~ Czeslaw Milosz
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 