Marcus
https://www.goodreads.com/marcus1963
“We can live like it's the first days of a better world, not the like it's the first pages of an Ayn Rand novel. Have this place, but you can't have us. We withdraw our company.”
― Walkaway
― Walkaway
“All beings tremble before violence.
All fear death.
All love life.
See yourself in others.
Then whom can you hurt?
What harm can you do?”
― The Dhammapada
All fear death.
All love life.
See yourself in others.
Then whom can you hurt?
What harm can you do?”
― The Dhammapada
“The daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush. Lucky me that I should be permitted the luxury of choosing to find the intimacy inherent in this work that is thrust upon so many women. Lucky me.”
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“I decided to believe that [my mother] had made it her life task not to pass on her damage to me, to give me good gifts, including the ones she had been unable to give herself. And, not right away, but eventually, I decided to believe that she had succeeded.”
― Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories
― Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories
“The great, the universal problem is how to be always on a journey and yet see what you would see if it were only possible for you to stay home: a black cat in a garden, moving though iris blades behind a lilac bush. How to keep sufficiently detached and quiet inside so that when the cat in one spring reaches the top of the garden wall, turns down again, and disappears, you will see and remember it, and not be absorbed in that moment in the dryness of your hands.”
― The Folded Leaf
― The Folded Leaf
Marcus’s 2025 Year in Books
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