There were the people who read and there were the others. Whether you were a reader or a non-reader — it was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people.

“Night Train to Lisbon”, Pascal Mercier (via distantheartbeats) (via aloneinkioto) (via bugseatbooks) (via libraryland)

Posted on January 23, 2010 via Distant Heartbeats

Source: distantheartbeats

Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?

Haruki Murakami in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (via predatorywaspobserver) (via libraryland)

Posted on January 23, 2010 via Predatory Wasp Observer with 51 notes

Source: predatorywaspobserver

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his senses tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners. Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction. (via msodradek) (via enormousair) (via booklover) (via missworld) (via ipictureyouinthesun) (via kendalllouise) (via libraryland)

Posted on January 23, 2010 via Ms. Odradek with 62 notes

Source: msodradek

Everything we do is a choice: oatmeal or cereal, highway or side street, kiss her or keep her. We make choices and we live with the consequences. If someone gets hurt along the way we ask for forgiveness. It’s the best anyone can do.

Ned, Pushing Daisies (via quote-book) (via tvquotes)

Posted on January 23, 2010 via Quote Book: with 728 notes

Source: quote-book

(via libraryland)

Posted on January 23, 2010 via Libraryland

Source: libraryland

libraryland:

obsoletethebook:

libraryland:

bibliotheque:

And that’s why books are never going to die. It’s impossible. It’s the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn’t only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

-Paul Auster

Hope you’re right, Paul.

Posted on January 23, 2010

printedandbound:

“It was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he had promised in six weeks’ time to talk “some nonsense” to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, his glory in the phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife’s beauty, in the tributes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge—all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase “talking nonsense,” because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like—this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.”

To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Posted on January 23, 2010 via printed&bound with 10 notes

Source: printedandbound