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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs. It makes me think of Jacob Marley telling Scrooge, ‘These are the chains I forged in life.’
Films are ephemeral, while books—the good ones—are eternal, or close to it.
My grandmother used to say a person shouldn’t call out unless they want an answer.
African proverb I’d read in one of my classes: When an old man dies, a library burns.
“The human brain is finite—no more than a sponge of tissue inside a cage of bone—but the mind within the brain is infinite. Its storage capacity is colossal, its imaginative reach beyond our ability to comprehend. I think when a man or woman dies, a whole world falls to ruin—the world that person knew and believed in. Think of that, kiddo—billions of people on earth, and each one of those billions with a world inside. The earth their minds have conceived.”
“It’s from Balzac. ‘Behind every great fortune there is a crime.’
“I love you, Mom,” Holly says, and ends the call. Is that true? Yes. It’s liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end.
“See ye devils, then shall ye not see angels?” Holly says.
As a dog returneth to its vomit, so a fool repeateth his folly.
“Writers have different habits, different ways of getting in the groove, and they work at different speeds, but to produce a long work, there must always come extended periods of focused narration.”
