On Books and Reading

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

“It's a great blessing if one can lose all sense of time, all worries, if only for a short time, in a book.”
-- Nella Last

[Russ]

Now in audio!
http://www.audible.com/pd/Self-Develo...

[Anna]

This is a quotation worth remembering from Tollesbury Time Forever by Stuart Ayris:

"A" he pronounced. "Anger Devours The Soul."

I liked this quotation:

"And what is death but a new experience?"

I definitely think of death like that - I hope I don't change my mind when the time comes!

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

You will like this, then, Anna:

Death Is A Door
Death is only an old door
Set in a garden wall
On gentle hinges it gives, at dusk
When the thrushes call
Along the lintel are green leaves
Beyond the light lies still;
Very willing and weary feet
Go over that sill
There is nothing to trouble any heart;
Nothing to hurt at all.
Death is only a quiet door.
In an old wall.

by Nancy Byrd Turner

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.

That is their mystery and their magic.”

--Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

[Jakky]

the best love quotes enligthen your heart up by D Lufy

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019...



it is also now free on Dec 24 -Dec 29

thanks

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

A person like me is not adapted to the world we live in. I started reading because I found living difficult, and I wondered if there were a more tranquil way to live.
Yoshiharu Tsuge
L'homme sans talent

I hear you, Yoshiharu-san.

[Anna]

It's a reassuring thought to discover that we can relate very well to people from vastly different cultures.

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

A woman at one of my mother's parties once said to me, "Do you like reading?" which smote us all to silence, for how could one tell her that books are like having a bath or sleeping or eating bread--absolute necessities which one never thinks of in terms of appreciation. (The Brontës Went to Woolworths)

That is exactly how I feel about books.

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

"No one can write a book which children will like unless he writes it for himself first." A A Milne

[Anna]

Perhaps because it is Easter, this quotation from


came to mind.

“Become acquainted with your soul, care for it, for it will outlast all you have.”

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are. Mason Cooley

[Anna]

How very true, Orinoco. And a consolation to those who cannot go on exotic holidays.

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

I have nothing to explain about a story, if it doesn't explain itself.
Half a Rupee Stories, Gulzar

YES.

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge. I take them like opium.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson

(and I would add, they are just as addictive, though usually less harmful, depending on what you read. I will not answer for the effects of slushy faux-historical romance on the human psyche.)

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or to go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.
History of the Rain


Those are also good reasons to read stories, or to write them.

[Orinoco Womble (tidy bag and all)]

"Books are where things are explained to you. Life is where things aren't."
Flaubert's Parrot

I can forgive Barnes for that whole rambling, diffuse piece of turgid prose for that quote alone.