Category: quotable
here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose
“when I went into the library, with its four windows open to the moonlight and the scent, and looked round at the familiar bookshelves, and could hear no sounds but sounds of peace, and knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own blessedness”
- Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and Her German Garden
Love stories
“The stories we stay up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.”
-Jeanette Winterson
The Powerbook
In Praise of the Potato
Potato, sojourner north, first sprung
from the flanks of volcanoes, plainspoken kinto bright chili and deadly nightshade,
sleek eggplant and hairy tobacco,we could live on you alone if we had to,
and scorched-earth marauders never bothered you much.I love you because your body’s a stem,
your eyes sprout, and you’re not in the Bible,and if we did not eat your strength,
you’d drive it up, into a flower.
By David Williams, from Traveling Mercies
And with those thanks to the potato (and sweet potato), I plunged my spoon into my Japanese curry leftovers. Japanese curry and rice. Not all that good for you, but quick to prepare and oh, so tasty a dinner.
Reading The Unit
“People who read books,” he went on, “tend to be dispensable. Extremely.”
“Right,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
- Ninni Holmqvist
