To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind.
You go on. You set one foot in front of the other, and if a thin voice cries out, somewhere behind you, you pretend not to hear, and keep going.
A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.
I took the T from Logan airport to Harvard Square. I hate driving in Boston. It’s the traffic that drives me spare, and the absolutely terrible manners of the motorists. Other New Englanders refer to Massachusetts drivers as “Massholes.
Life is better than death. I know this. Tequamuck says it is the coward’s talk. I say it is braver, sometimes, to bend.
Until you opened it, the book was nothing that an untrained eye would look twice at.
There’s a word a friend of mine coined for that feeble gesture we make as if we’re going to hold the door, when in reality we’ve got no intention of it. He calls it “to elefain.
Harvard Square could feel like a party on a warm night, full of energy and privilege and promise. Or it could seem like one of the bleakest places on earth – an icy, windswept rat maze where kids wasted their youth clawing over one another in a fatuous contest for credentials.
How was it that he could remember not remembering, and yet the fugitive facts themselves remained so elusive? How could he misplace the skills of a lifetime? Where did such knowledge go?
Only one god. Strange, that you English, who gather about you so many things, are content with one only.
The heat of late afternoon closed in around us like an animate thing; you could feel it on your skin, warm and moist, like a great beast panting. The air was so dense it seemed to require a huge effort even to inhale it. It lay thick in the lungs and seemed to give no refreshment. Pg 163.
How often it is that an idea that seems bright bossed and gleaming in its clarity when examined in a church, or argued over with a friend in a frosty garden, becomes clouded and murk-stained when dragged out into the field of actual endeavor. pg. 65.
Time turned into a rope that unraveled as a languid spiral.
I simply ask you to see that there is only one thing to do when we fall, and that is to get up, and go on with the life that is set in front of us, and try and do the good of which our hands are capable for all the people who come in our way...
There are always a few who stand up in times of communal madness and have the courage to say that what unites us is greater than what divides us.