--John Steinbeck, East Of Eden
And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.
--John Steinbeck, East Of Eden One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.
--Jose Saramago, Seeing She hardly ever thought of him. He had worn a place for himself in some corner of her heart, as a sea shell, always boring against the rock, might do. The making of the place had been her pain. But now the shell was safely in the rock. It was lodged, and ground no longer.
--T.H. White, The Once And Future King We try to be formed and held and kept by him, but instead he offers us freedom. And now when I try to know his will, his kindness floods me, his great love overwhelms me, and I hear him whisper, Surprise me.
--Ron Hansen, Mariette In Ecstasy There is much to love, and that love is what we are left with. When the bombs stop dropping, and the camps fall back to the earth and decay, and we are done killing each other, that is what we must hold. We can never let the world take our memories of love away, and if there are no memories, we must invent love all over again.
--Louise Murphy, The True Story Of Hansel And Gretel That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.
--Marilynne Robinson, Home Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find the words.
--Rainer Maria Rilke It always makes me proud to love the world somehow- hate's so easy compared.
--Jack Kerouac, Big Sur It is my favorite thing, I think, that I have ever seen. Sometimes I catch myself staring at it and forget my duties. It seems big enough to contain everything anyone could ever feel.
--Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See He wasn’t a religious man but a vision of what Paradise might be came to him, a windowed room afloat on an endless sea, walls packed floor to ceiling with all the books ever written or dreamed of. It was nearly enough to make giving up the world bearable.
--Michael Crummey, Galore |
Alissa B.Nothing commonplace about The Common Place. Archives
December 2023
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