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October 02
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Kirsten
is currently reading:
Boundaries (Paperback)
by Henry Cloud
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Kirsten
is currently reading:
Specimen Days (SIGNED)
by Michael Cunningham
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September 27
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Kirsten
is currently reading:
The Highly Sensitive Person (Paperback)
by Elaine N. Aron
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currently-reading
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Kirsten
gave
to:
The Corrections: A Novel (Paperback)
by Jonathan Franzen
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Added to my books!
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read in September, 2008
Kirsten said:
""elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest."
"and when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight - isn't that a strange thing? that absolutely nothing changes except that you see things d...more
"elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest."
"and when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight - isn't that a strange thing? that absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? you see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. and it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. moments like this."...less
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September 15
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Kirsten
gave
to:
Heart of Darkness and the Secret Sharer (Paperback)
by Joseph Conrad
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read in September, 2008
Kirsten said:
""the earth seemed unearthly. we are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. it was unearthly, and the men were - no, they were not inhuman. well, you know,...more
"the earth seemed unearthly. we are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there - there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. it was unearthly, and the men were - no, they were not inhuman. well, you know, that there was the worst of it - this suspicion of their not being inhuman. it would come slowly to one. they howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. ugly. yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you - you so remote from the night of first ages - could comprehend. and why not? the mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. what was there after all? joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage - who can tell? - but truth - truth stripped of its cloak of time."
"there was no sign on the face of nature of this amazing tale that was not so much told as suggested to me in desolate exclamations, completed by shrugs, in interrupted phrases, in hints ending in deep sighs. the woods were unmoved, like a mask - heavy, like the closed door of a prison - they looked with their air of hidden knowledge, of patient expectation, of unapproachable silence."
"they only showed that mr. kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him - some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. whether he knew of this deficiency himself i can't say. i think the knowledge came to him at last - only at the very last. but the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. i think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he took counsel with this great solitude - and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. it echoed loudly within him because he was hollow at the core."...less
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August 12
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Kirsten
added:
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Paperback)
by Milan Kundera
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read in August, 2008
Kirsten said:
""slowing down, he started to look at the scenery. actually, he had never before looked at the scenery. he had always driven toward a goal, to arrange or discuss something, and for him the world's space had become a negative, a waste of time, an ...more
"slowing down, he started to look at the scenery. actually, he had never before looked at the scenery. he had always driven toward a goal, to arrange or discuss something, and for him the world's space had become a negative, a waste of time, an obstacle slowing down his activity."
"they shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. the future is only an indifferent void no one cares about, but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy or repaint it. we want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past."
"that is when i understood the magical meaning of the circle. if you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. a row is an open formation. but a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. it is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. like a meteorite broken off from a planet, i left the circle and have not yet stopped falling. some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. and these others (i am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles."
"we write books because our children aren't interested in us. we address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them. you might say that the taxi driver is not a writer but a graphomaniac. so we need to be precise about our concepts. a woman who writes her lover four letters a day is not a graphomaniac. she is a lover. but my friend who makes photocopies of his love letters to publish them someday is a graphomaniac. graphomania inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: 1) an elevated level of general well-being; 2) a high degree of social atomization and, as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; 3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life. but by backlash, the effect affects the cause. general isolation breeds graphomania, and generalized graphomania in turn intensifies and worsens isolation. the invention of printing formerly enabled people to understand one another. in the era of universal graphomania, the writing of books has an opposite meaning: everyone surrounded by his own words as by a wall of mirrors, which allows no voice to filter through from outside."
"the irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! for everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. one morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived."
"she realized what gave her written memories their meaning and worth was that they were intended for her alone. as soon as they lost that quality, the intimate tie binding her to them would be cut, and she would be able to read them no longer with her own eyes but only with the eyes of the readers perusing a document about some other person. then even she who had written them would become for her some other person, an outsider. the striking similarity that would nonetheless remain between her and the author of the notes would have the effect of parody, of mockery, no, she would never be able to read her notes if they had been read by outsiders."
"she held on to life by a thread. yes, she did not want to live, life gave her great joy, but she also knew that her 'i want to live' was spun from the threads of spiderweb. it takes so little, so infinitely little, for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything - love, convictions, faith, history - no longer has meaning. the whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter."...less
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July 29
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Kirsten
gave
to:
A Woman's Education (Paperback)
by Jill Ker Conway
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my rating:
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read in July, 2008
Kirsten said:
""doing the conventional things - marrying, beginning a career - gave me a false sense of security, as though the task of relating inner and outer self had been definitely completed. as a young married woman in my thirties, i expected that there ...more
"doing the conventional things - marrying, beginning a career - gave me a false sense of security, as though the task of relating inner and outer self had been definitely completed. as a young married woman in my thirties, i expected that there weren't going to be too many more iterations of the quest for self-definition. but, of course, i was wrong. i wasn't quite forty when i arrived at smith and ran instantly into one of the major challenges of adulthood. that challenge is to protect and sustain the inner self we've labored so hard to release while fully entering into the roles we have to play as adults with major symbolic, professional, and personal responsibilities. the coming-of-age story doesn't deal with what we have to do to sustain the inner self against all the structures of society - family, professions, voluntary institutions, political movements, competing vocations - all of which demand conformity to their ideal types.
one of the most seductive attractions of the romantic view of life is the notion that there exists somewhere the perfect partner who resonates emotionally to every note of one's own inner music. and that there is one vocation we are destined to take up in which we will find nothing out of key and experience no disharmonies between our working and private self. but the reality is otherwise. most people are a cluster of talents that could potentially be applied in myriad different ways. and the rate of divorce tells us that the uniquely preordained soul mate is hard to find. so the challenge in adulthood is to sustain that inner self while entering passionately into a complicated set of relationships, any one of which may contain who we are. the alternate is to stand back from life or to choose the "safe" commitments that don't demand much. i was born a risk taker. safety was never attractive."...less
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July 23
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Kirsten
gave
to:
True North: A Memoir (Paperback)
by Jill Ker Conway
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in July, 2008
Kirsten said:
""endurance is the great virtue when nature goes awry" - whether pertaining to weather cycles or depression. "if one only knows how to wait, nature, of which we are so strangely both an integral part and a distant consciousness, will re
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July 20
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Kirsten
gave
to:
The Road from Coorain (Paperback)
by Jill Ker Conway
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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read in July, 2008
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July 13
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Kirsten
gave
to:
Take the Risk: Learning to Identify, Choose, and Live With Acceptable Risk (Hardcover)
by Ben Carson
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my rating:
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read in July, 2008
Kirsten said:
""odds that you will die at some point in your life: 1 in 1. thus, you might say the greatest, most significant, and universal risk factor in death is being born. this implies that it really isn't very helpful to approach the subject of risk by f...more
"odds that you will die at some point in your life: 1 in 1. thus, you might say the greatest, most significant, and universal risk factor in death is being born. this implies that it really isn't very helpful to approach the subject of risk by focusing on how we might die; rather, it's far wiser to consider how we should live and what risks we will live with."
"far better is it to dare mighty things than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much." - t. roosevelt
"it all boils down to your values. if your priority is to look good in front of people, your life will take a different direction than if your priority is to use the talents God has given you to make a positive difference in the world. such values will influence what risks you choose to take."
"the greatest risk in removing faith from the public square is that we, our society, and our world lose any real sense of right and wrong. the politically correct thinking on this is not only completely illogical, but distortedly dangerous. dostoevsky observed, 'if you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immorality, not only love, but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up...for if God does not exist, everything is permitted.' dostoevsky was right. without faith and values by which to weigh the answers of our B/WAs, there is no way to conduct a valid or meaningful risk analysis. for if there is no right or wrong, there can be no best or worst."...less
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