Reflections of a Recreational Reader: Part II

The dental curriculum is done and scheduled to launch next month. Our new garden for orphans and vulnerable children (OVCs) is out of planning mode and finally coming to fruition. And at least one of my facilitator guides is ready for publication.

I’m starting a reading program at the orphanage and preparing new lessons and activities for Girls Club and my Awareness group. Yet despite these projects and programs, guides and gardens, I still find time for reading.

Lots of it.

Thankfully, I have a former editor, an old colleague and some good friends to supply me (and by extension, other PCVs,) with a steady stream of new novels, biographies, essays and short stories. So now, just as before, I thought I’d share some of the more meaningful passages and favorite quotes that I’ve come across along the way.

Knowing what matters is easy. Choosing what matters—that’s the hardest part.
--The Secret Life of Bees

But the stronger ones raised up the weaker ones, and both became stronger in the process.
--Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

A leader is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go on ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.
-- Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.
--African Proverb

It is only our arrogance that prompts us to find unnecessarily complicated answers to simple problems.
--Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor

It is not the big events that hurt the most, but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.
--Shop Girl

We are imperfect mental beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn out losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves.
--Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

We are drawn to what abandoned us but we are defined by what embraces us.
--The Tender Bar

Failure is part of learning. Fear of failure can paralyze you. If you don’t risk looking ridiculous or inept or even stupid sometimes, you may stay secure, but you’ll also stay the same.
--Maria Shriver

Here, freedom was not entertainment like a carnival ride or a hoedown…Here freedom was a test administered by the natural world that a man had to take for himself everyday. And if he passed enough tests long enough, he was king.
--Toni Morrison, Paradise

I never saw a wild thing that was sorry for itself
--D.H. Lawrence

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of all there was to know.
-Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

It’s difficult to remember how we thought about the known before it became known.
--Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There’d Be Cake

It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.
--Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom