Reflections of a Recreational Reader: Part VI

No computer has meant plenty of time for literature. Here are some of my favorite quotes from my most recent reads.

In a funny way, nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not.
-I'm a Stranger Here Myself, Bill Bryson

The creative mind plays with objects it loves.
-Carly Jung

Money is what's needed to survive. Time is what's needed to live.

It's better to have something to remember than nothing to regret.
-Frank Zappa

The best part of one's life is spent earning money in order to enjoy questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.
-Thoreau

Self nor wealth can be measured in terms of what you own or consume.
-Rolf Pots

very many people spend money in ways quite different from those that their natural tastes would enjoin, merely because the respect of their neighbors depends upon their possesion of a good car and their ability to give good dinners. As a matter of fact, any man who can obviously afford a car but genuinely perfers travels or a good library will in the end, be much more respected than if he behaved exactly like everyone else.
-Bertrand Russell

My greatest skill has been to want little.
-Thoreau

As it happened, I did not grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to that bend int he river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the artificial rain forever falls, that is the line I wait to hear.
-Joan Didion

That is the charm of a map. It represents the other side of the horizon where everything is possible.
-Rosita Forbes

Once a journey is designed, equipped and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity...no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards and policing are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip. A trip takes us.
-Travels with Charlie, John Steinbeck

We see as we are.
-Buddah

As soon as we take one thing by itself, we find it is hitched to everything in the Universe.
-John Muir

Every moment is golden for him who has the vision to realize it as such.
-Henry Miller

People say what we are seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that is what we're really seeking. I think what we are seeking is the experience of being alive.
-Joseph Campbell

And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
-T.S. Eliot

If the fulfillment of one's dreams is the only referendum on whether they are beautiful or worth dreaming, then no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder.
-David Rakoff

The joy of youth is not to be bothered by where things might have gone, but to find our where things are going.
-Suze Rotolo

It is impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact. You always have to leave something out. There are too many parts, sides, cross currents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be full described, too many flavors in the air or on the tongue. Half-colors. Too many.
-The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Attwood

I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive or not...We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loved ones and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed. Forget who we were.
-Joan Didion

Reflections of a Recreational Reader: Part V

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or your predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

-William Faulkner

The most extraordinary gift you've been given is your own humanity.

-Eustace Conway

A big heart is both a clumsy and delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out...where you can see the soul pulse through.

-Bird by Bird

Above me, wind does its best
to blow leaves off
the aspen tree a month too soon
No use wind. All you succeed
in doing is making music. The noise
of failure growing beautiful

-Bill Holm

It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.

You have to be stronger than your fears if you want anything done in this life.

-The Interpreter

Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip.

-The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Sometimes I go about pitying myself and all the while I am being carried on great winds across the sky.

-Lakota Sioux Saying

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed our soul.

-Bird by Bird

We all must suffer one of two things: The pain of great discipline, or the pain of great disappointment

We used to live on less than what folks throw away these days.

-The Last American Man

If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand--things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability.

-The Tipping Point

Just because your voice reaches half way around the world doesn't mean you are any wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

-Edward R Murrow

Reflections of a Recreational Reader: Part IV

Let the beauty of love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

--Rumi

The act of making art exposes a society to itself. Art brings things to light. It illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, 'see?'

--The Artist's Way

Once you have known need it is a phantom that hangs over any luxury

--Julia Alvarez, Saving the World

We say that people are proud of being rich or clever or good looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If everyone else became equally rich, or clever or good-looking, there would be nothing to be proud of

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Everything is usually so masked and perfumed in this world, and it's touching when you get to see something real and human. I think that's why most of us stay close to our families, no matter how neurotic the members, how deeply annoying or dull--because when people have seen you at your worst, you don't have to put on the mask as much. And that gives us license to try on that radical hat of liberation, the hat of self-acceptanc; we're allowed to escape from underneath one of the fatwas

--Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies

Our own life is the instrument with which we experience the truth

--Thich Nhat Hanh

Arguing isn't where the faith is. That just feeds the ego. It's all in the doing.

--Phil Jackson, Sacred Hoops

We are here to learn to endure the beams of love

--Blake

Haroun knew what he knew; That the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could be real

--Haroun and the Sea of Stories

There are cracks in everything. That's how light gets in.

--Leonard Cohen

And we will be ready, at the end of every day will be ready, will not say no to anything, will try to stay awake while everyone is sleeping, will not sleep, will make the shoes with the elves, will breathe deeply all the time, breathe in all the air full of glass, and nails and blood, will breathe it and drink it, so rich, so when it comes we will not be angry, will be content, tired enough to go, gratefully, will shake hands with everyone, bye, bye, and then pack a bag, some snacks, and go to the volcano

--Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

No man knows how bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

She was extending a hand that I didn't know how to take, so I broke her fingers with my silence

--Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

In religion, as in war and everythingg else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth...in the end, only despair

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

History says don't hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime, the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up, and hope and history rhyme

--Seamus Heanly

One: out of clutter find simplicity. Two: from discord find harmony. Three: In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity

--Albert Einstein

When the work is done she forgets. That is why it lasts forever
--Tao Te Ching

Reflections of a Recreational Reader: Part III

I've never understood a society of want. We don't have a society of want--not on a general level. We have a society of total surplus: unwanted goods. Unwanted people.
--Studs Turkle, Hard Times

Finding yourself comes right after discovering your insignificance.
--Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the heart of man: one very reasonably tells the man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of avoiding it; the other even more reasonable says that it is too painful and harassing to think of danger, since it is not in a man's power to provide for everything and escape from the general march of events...In solitude a man generally yeilds to the first voice. In society, to the second.
--Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Any action that has self-glorification as its end point is bound to be a disaster.
--Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Happiness grows in direct proportion to acceptance and in inverse proportion to expectation.
--Michael J. Fox

It's better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of someone else's life with perfection
--Bhagavad Gita

Some people say, 'New York's a great place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.' I say that about other places.
--Robert DiNiro

Whole foods and industrial foods are the only two food groups I'd consider including in any useful pyramid. We should simply avoid anything that has been processed to such an extent that it is more a product of industry than of nature.
--Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food

I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor--such is my idea of happiness.
--Leo Tolstoy, Family Happiness

Risk is the cost of aggressive objectives.
--Andy Grove

...

Think of the small as large
and the few as many.
Confront the difficult
while it is still easy;
accomplish the great task
by a series of small acts.

-Tao te Ching

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

Reflections of a Recreational Reader

Even with new projects and programs, fund raising, adapting and integration, my Peace Corps service has given me plenty of time to catch up on recreational reading. From Great Books to Chick Lit, biographies to memoirs, I’ve spent afternoons with nearly every genre. I’ve been keeping track of favorite quotes and meaningful passages since I first arrived in Namibia. Ultimately, what I’ve taken away from these authors and their stories may say as much about my experience as my blogs and journals do…

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you will discover will be wonderful. What you discover will be yourself --Alan Alda

What made being alive almost worthwhile for me, besides music, was all the saints I met who could be anywhere. By saints, I mean people who behave decently in a strikingly indecent society --Kurt Vonnegut

There are times when, as ordinary as it all appears, it was beyond my imagination --Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies

Courage does not always roar. Sometimes courage is just that quiet voice at the end of the day that says: I’ll try again tomorrow --Anne Hunninbale

In any city, at any hour … there are people sleeping … But…there are a few people who are awake at this hour who are both awake and dancing, and its here that we need to be…To be awake with the people who were still dancing --You Shall Know Our Velocity

Peace. It does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble or hard work. It means to be in the midst of these things and still find calm in your heart --A greeting card

Every soft foot needs a hard sole --In the Time of Butterflies

Life only gets exciting when it gets tough --Last Song of Dusk

What do we do when we finally reach the summit and flop down? We weep. All inhibitions stripped away. We cry like babies. With joy for having scaled the mightiest of mountains, and with relief that the long torture of the climb has ended --Barry Bishop

Do not conquer the world with force, for force only causes resistance --Tao Te Ching

I am grateful for this trouble around me because it gives me an opportunity to see how fortunate I am --Chuang-Tse

If we citizens do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our own imagination at the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams --Yann Martel, The Life of Pi

The arts are not a way of making a living. They are a way of making life more bearable --Kurt Vonnegut

There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin freely—a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement --Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice