Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Seriously, I do not know what to say of this book [ Absalom, Absalom!] except that it seem to point to the final blowup of what was once a remarkable, if minor, talent… this is a penny dreadful tricked up in fancy language and given a specious depth by the expert manipulation of a series of eccentric technical tricks. The characters have no magnitude and no meaning because they have no more reality than a mince-pie nightmare.
At its heart, this book touches on a mystery of economics: what exactly is happening in our world, and why does it often work so well? As the authors show, apparently messy systems - such as untidy desks - actually exhibit a high degree of order: the piles of paper are close to hand, and the most important documents tend to make their way to the top while un-needed ones sink to the bottom. If the mess works, why mess with it?
I'm working with wind, solar, and biofuels companies as well as with organizations like ACORE [American Council On Renewable Energy], Growth Energy, and AREDAY to raise public awareness and seek practical technological solutions to reduce our reliance on fossilized carbon. My book Don't Wait for the Next War will be out in October, where I will offer my prescription for America's growth, responsible development, and security.
This was the kiss I had waited for so long - a kiss born by the river of our childhood, when we didn't yet know what love meant. A kiss that had been suspended in the air as we grew, that had traveled in the world in the sovenier of a medal, and that had remained hidden behind piles of books. A kiss that had been lost and now was found. In the moment of that kiss were years of searching, disillusionment and impossible dreams.
The funny thing is, nationalism only could have come about in Europe after the invention of printing. You could have this thing that was a book in a vernacular language, and you could imagine there were other readers of this book who you couldn't see, but they were a theoretical union of readers who all use the same language. That is kind of a prerequisite for a national fantasy. You need that thing, and it's a strange thing.
We live in a cluttered culture, a culture of information in which even our computers can't tell us what's worth knowing and what is merely cultural scrap. In such a society, we don't have the experience of contemplative space, of the time or mood to engage a book of poetry or even read a novel. Who can achieve the unconscious-conscious state of the reader when everything is stimulation, everything is movement and information?
For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, that poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is a slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.
Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be values is not real value.
Everybody has a ‘gripping stranger’ in their lives, Andy, a stranger who unwittingly possesses a bizarre hold over you. Maybe it’s the kid in cut-offs who mows your lawn or the woman wearing White Shoulders who stamps your book at the library—a stranger who, if you were to come home and find a message from them on your answering machine saying ‘Drop everything. I love you. Come away with me now to Florida,’ you’d follow them.
One of the metaphors of the book is the carpet. Not just the flying carpet, but the carpet as a woven surface in which many repetitions and motifs recur and mirror one another. This is very much reflected within the stories: they have borders within borders, repeated motifs which change. They have their feet in oral conventions, and for the mnemonics, the storyteller needs to have a structure in order to remember the stories.
In 1815, M. Charles Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of D-----. He was a man of seventy-five, and had occupied the bishopric of D----- since 1806. Although it in no manner concerns, even in the remotest degree, what we have to relate, it may not be useless, were it only for the sake of exactness in all things, to notice here the reports and gossip which had arisen on his account from the time of his arrival in the diocese.
There's the excitement of adding color, which I didn't know anything about until 1997 or so, when I did my first picture book. So, the kid's book in particular have been exciting for me because it forced me to go back to the work I loved as a young boy reading Sunday's supplements and comics in the Sunday papers when I was six, seven, eight, nine. And number of which have been in wonderful collections, beautifully reproduced.
She sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she practices through the procession of hours, or of days.
Barrie and the wonderful characters he created, Lewis Carroll, even French literature, like Baudelaire or over in the States, Poe, you open those books, you open The Flowers of Evil and begin to read. If it were written today, you'd be absolutely stupefied by the work. It's this incredible period where the work is timeless, ageless. So yeah, I just love all those guys. It's my deep passion in those great 19th century writers.
Comics play a trite but lusty tune on the C natural keys of human nature. They rouse the most primitive, but also the most powerful, reverberations in the noisy cranial sound-box of consciousness, drowning out more subtle symphonies. Comics scorn finesse, thereby incurring the wrath of linguistic adepts. They defy the limits of accepted fact and convention, thus amortizing to apoplexy the ossified arteries of routine thought.
I had written three books [Games of Throne], at that point, and each one of them was better than the other. At a certain point, as the books were doing well, I started getting interest from Hollywood, from various producers and studios who were initially interested in doing a feature film. I met with some of those people and I had phone conversations with some of those people, but I didn't see it being done as a feature film.
Blindsight is excellent. It's state-of-the-art science fiction: smart, dark and it grabs you by the throat from page one. Like a C J Cherryh book it makes you feel the danger of the hostile environment (or lack of one) out there. And it plays with some fascinating possibilities in human development, and some disconcerting ideas about human consciousness. What else can I say? Thanks for giving me the privilege of reading this.
Works of imagination excel by their allurement and delight; by their power of attracting and detaining the attention. That book is good in vain which the reader throws away. He only is the master who keeps the mind in pleasing captivity; whose pages are perused with eagerness, and in hope of new pleasure are perused again; and whose conclusion is perceived with an eye of sorrow, such as the traveller casts upon departing day.
One book that has meant much to my writing is W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants. He uses a photograph of Vladimir Nabokov hunting butterflies in a similar way. The image or a reference to the image is traced throughout the four separate narratives. It sometimes seems to be the only link between the pieces, while the symbol Nabokov cuts remains wide open, a pencil sketch, a mystery to interpret outside his role as emigrant/observer.
Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.
I'd make an educated guess that 20 to 25 percent of the taxable property in the U.S. is Church-owned.In a recent book, Church Wealth and Business Income, it was estimated that this property -all of it tax-exempt -is worth upwards of 80 billion dollars. I know that's a fantastic, unbelievable figure, but there's every reason to believe that it's on the conservative side; and this amount is increasing yearly at a geometric rate.
This was an age before e-books. We all knew that the only way you can allow a book to survive in print in the long term is in paperback. The hardback has a certain life, and then it stops having that. It stops selling, and if you want the book to just stay around there has to be a paperback edition. So if there were not a paperback edition the book would eventually disappear from the shelves, and we would have lost the battle.
We're not ignored by The Guinness Book Of Records, but we've been largely ignored by the media during our lifetime. If you read any article, no mention is ever made of Pink Floyd. We're never included in the same sentences as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who. I wrote 'The Wall' as an attack on stadium rock - and there's Pink Floyd making money out of it by playing it in stadiums! Pathetic. They spoiled my creations.
The last publicized center of American writing was Manhattan. Its writers became known as the New York Intellectuals. With important connections to publishing, and universities, with access to the major book reviews, they were able to pose as the vanguard of American culture when they were so obsessed with the two Joes--McCarthy and Stalin--that they were to produce only two artists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, who left town.
As the field of coaching finds its way to becoming a mature discipline, James Flaherty's dedicated field research, study, and sound articulation offers a definitive ground and a sensibility of genuine care. At the core this book offers a way of thinking about human beings that makes action and practice central to learning. This is a no-nonsense, generous, pragmatic book that belongs on the shelf every coach, novice or veteran.
Gary Greenberg is a thoughtful comedian and a cranky philosopher and a humble pest of a reporter, equal parts Woody Allen, Kierkegaard, and Columbo. The Book of Woe is a profound, and profoundly entertaining, riff on malady, power, and truth. This book is for those of us (i.e. all of us) who've ever wondered what it means, and what's at stake, when we try to distinguish the suffering of the ill from the suffering of the human.
Then what shall I write? I can't just write that this happened then this happened then this happened to boring infinitum. I'll let my journal grow just like the mind does, just like a tree or beast does, just like life does. Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line? Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.
Jonathan Wells has done us all - the scientific community, educators, and the wider public - a great service. In Icons of Evolution he has brilliantly exposed the exaggerated claims and deceptions that have persisted in standard textbook discussions of biological origins for many decades, in spite of contrary evidence. these claims have been so often repeated that they seem unassailable - that is, until one reads Wells's book.
By nature's law, every man has a right to seize and retake by force his own property taken from him by another, by force of fraud. Nor is this natural right among the first which is taken into the hands of regular government after it is instituted. It was long retained by our ancestors. It was a part of their common law, laid down in their books, recognized by all the authorities, and regulated as to circumstances of practice.
This wasn't the way I had imagined my adventures, but reality ignored my wishes from the get-go, giving me a body best suited for stacking books in the library, injecting so much fear into my veins that I could only cower in the stairwell when the violence came. Maybe someday my arms and legs would thicken with muscle and the fear would drain away like dirty bathwater. I wish I believed these things would happen, but I didn't.
The BIBLE - banned, burned, beloved. More widely read, more frequently attacked than any other book in history. Generations of intellectuals have attempted to discredit it, dictators of every age have outlawed it and executed those who read it. Yet soldiers carry it into battle believing it more powerful than their weapons. Fragments of it smuggled into solitary prison cells have transformed ruthless killers into gentle saints
I do have personal relationships with a lot of "fans," in quotations. I answer all my mail, I get emails from fans, and I try to answer them all. That's important to me, but occasionally there's the thing where people basically ask me to write book reports for them, and I don't have that kind of time. I feel like there's a certain sexism involved, like because I'm a woman I'm supposed to constantly be like giving to everybody.
Adaptation is always the same process for me, which is some version of throwing the book at the wall and seeing what pages fall out. It is trying to imagine, remember the story, read it, put it down, and then write sort of an outline without the book in front of you with some hope that what you like about it will be filtered and distilled out through your memory and then that will be similar to what other people like about it.
I'm astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will's surrender. I begin because I don't have the strength to think; I finish because I don't have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.
Although logging workouts seems to be a very simple action, it is often forgotten. Once several days go by, it is hard to remember what was done on a particular day. After working out for several months, you will feel an unbelievable sense of achievement when flipping through the pages of the log book. You should also notice a sign of improvement. 'Material proof' can be great motivation and will encourage you to keep on going.
Mr. Fresh looked up. "The book says if we don't do our jobs everything could go dark, become like the Underworld. I don't know what the Underworld is like, Mr. Asher, but I've caught some of the road show from there a couple of times, and I'm not interested in finding out. How 'bout you?" "Maybe it's Oakland," Charlie said. "What's Oakland?" "The Underworld." "Oakland is not the Underworld!" "The Tenderloin?" Charlie suggested.
Language is a theme in the whole book, no? I mean it ends with the title poem about words are all we have. I guess midrash makes sense. How does it change in the course of the sequence? Well, God is into No and into Stasis/Nouns. Adam and Eve, in order to be in this world (and get this world going) must choose verbs. Which is to gain sex but also to choose death and all else that goes with change. To choose becoming over being.
You know that feeling,” she said, “when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing tight around the characters who live and breathe on the pages. But you are tied to the story as if being dragged behind a carriage and you cannot let go or turn the course aside.” His blue eyes were dark with understanding — of course Will would understand.
I was taught to read by my grandmother. Central to her method was a tale of unnatural love called 'The Duck and the Kangaroo'. Then, because my grandfather, Senator Gore, was blind, I was required early on to read grown-up books to him, mostly constitutional law and, of course, the Congressional Record. The later continence of my style is a miracle, considering those years of piping the additional remarks of Mr. Borah of Idaho.
Think about reading: Today, parents would love it if their kids read books more because the parents understand the books. Just over 100 years ago, parents were upset because their kids were reading dime-store novels. Parents would say, "I don't want you inside reading anymore. Get outside and play." I guarantee you, in 50 years or so, parents are going to say, "You're not going outside to play until you finish that video game."
Just like in the art museum, and notions of beauty and pleasure, if the hero is always a white guy with a squared jaw or pretty woman with big breasts, then kids start thinking that's how it's supposed to be. Part of the problem was that black comic book artists were making super heroes with the same pattern as the white super heroes. When you read a lot of those comics, the black super heroes don't seem to have anything to do.
Mainly horror movies and exploitation movies and a lot of stuff comes from those press books from those old movies. Lines out of old movies, comic books that we collect, all the old horror comics of the 50s, probably about the only comics that we collect are obscure horror comics, the real sick ones from the 50s. Some stuff comes from there but mainly just old records, old rockabilly records and that stuff, singles mainly, 45s.
I dance with people I despise; amuse myself with men whose only talent lies in their feet, gain the disapprobation of people I honor and respect; return home at day break with my brain in a state which was never intended for it; and arise in the middle of the next day feeling infinitely more, in spirit and flesh like a Liliputian, than a woman with body and soul. Entry (when she was eighteen) in her Commonplace Book, 1868-1869.
I think that actually the rhythmic nature of picture books and of young reader story books is a way to help kids fall in love with language and what you can do with it and how it sounds in your range. It sort of has a musicality but on the other hand they get the story and the ideas and the context of it. I think it's a way to get kids into it and I also think that when kids are around people who love books it rubs off on them.
It's not about you, it's about the next person. The single best use of a business book is to help someone else. Sharing what you read, handing the book to a person who needs it... pushing those around you to get in sync and to take action-that's the main reason it's a book, not a video or a seminar. A book is a souvenir and a container and a motivator and an easily leveraged tool. Hoarding books makes them worth less, not more.
This book is dedicated to you. Whether you are a Minion or a Skuttlebug or just, you know, a normal person, it’s because of you that I get to do what I love and laughingly call it work. I know some of you by name and some of you by sight (and some of you by smell, but let’s not get into that) but there are still countless others I have never met, and to all of you I say thank you for your support, your passion, and your lunacy.
I am a teacher... The life I lead is the most agreeable I can imagine. [In the] classroom ... there await me a group of intelligent and curious young ... [people] who read the books assigned them with a sense of adventure and discovery, discuss them with zest, and listen appreciatively to explications I may offer. What makes the process most satisfying is the conviction that ... education is mankind's most important enterprise.
I particularly love where I work because I was born, raised, and still live in the Bronx. I work in a Bronx location, so it's very fulfilling to me to be working in my home borough, and working with kids that are a lot like me and who can see themselves in me. My own teaching philosophy is to expose them to books that they might not otherwise read, particularly authors of color, authors whose stories are based in New York City.
My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was a part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book. ~Susie's grandmother, Lynn pgs 315-316
Again, men tell us that our preaching should be positive and not negative, that we can preach the truth without attacking error. But if we follow that advice we shall have to close our Bible and desert its teachings. The New Testament is a polemic book almost from beginning to end ... It is when men have felt compelled to take a stand against error that they have risen to the really great heights in the celebration of the truth