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WHEN I READ A BOOK, I UNDERLINE, I FOLD THE CORNERS, I WRITE NOTES, AND I GET ENGAGED IN THE BOOK - THE SUBJECT - AND THE DIALOGUE WITH THE AUTHOR.
I COLLECT ALL THE QUOTES OF INFORMATION, CLEVER PHRASES, ETC. THAT EACH BOOK GIVES ME. COPYRIGHT LAW PROHIBITS ME FROM GIVING YOU TOO MUCH ON THIS WEB PAGE, BUT I HAVE CHOSEN TO PROVIDE SOME PARAGRAPHS FOR ENJOYMENT, AND PERHAPS AS ENTICEMENT TO PURCHASE THE BOOK YOURSELF.
Gathering Moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer
The "moss" is many different mosses, of widely divergent forms. There are fronds like miniature ferns, wefts like ostrich plumes, and shining tufts like the silky hair of a baby. A close encounter with a mossy log always makes me think of entering a fantasy fabric shop. Its windows overflow with rich textures and colors that invite you closer to inspect the bolts of cloth arrayed before you. You can run your fingertips over a silky drape of Plagiothecium and finger the glossy Brotherella brocade. There are dark wooly tufts of Dicranum, sheets of golden Brachythecium, and shining ribbons of Mnium. The yardage of nubbly brown Callicladium tweed is shot through with gilt threads of Campylium. To pass hurriedly by without looking is like walking by the Mona Lisa chatting on a cell phone, oblivious.
Tree, David Suzki and Wayne Grady, Greystone Books, 2004
" there was just one fact to quicken the pulse. That fact is the close
similarity between chlorophyll and hemoglobin, the essence of our blood." This
is no fanciful comparison, but a literal, scientific analogy: "The one
significant difference in the two structural formulas is this: that the hub
of every hemoglobin molecule is one atom of iron, while in chlorophyll it is
one atom of magnesium." Just as chlorophyll is green because magnesium
absorbs all but the green light spectrum, blood is red because iron absorbs
all but the red. Chlorophyll is green blood. It is designed to capture light;
blood is designed to capture oxygen.
Pathways to Bliss, Joseph Campbell, New World Library, 2004
So, what I've told my students is this: follow your bliss. You'll have moments
when you'll experience bliss. And when that goes away, what happens to it?
Just stay with it, and there's more security in that than in finding out
where the money is going to come from next year. For years I've watched this
whole business of young people deciding on their careers. There are only
two attitudes: one is to follow your bliss; and the other is to read the
projections as to where the money is going to be when you graduate. Well,
it changes so fast. This year it's computer work; next year it's dentistry,
and so on. And no matter what the young person decides, by the time he or
she gets going, it will have changed. But if they have found where the center
of their real bliss is, they can have that. You may not have money, but you'll
have your bliss.
The Love Artist, Jane Alison, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001.
But behind them, much stronger, came the clamor of the gods. All the competing,
manufactured gods, shrilling and hissing with their pointed tongues, or forked
tongues, or tongues of snakes, or parrots, or bulls, all the tongues humans
had given them. She heard the voices of the older, official gods, worn and
juiceless at this age, but still watching with yellowed, spiteful eyes. And,
more urgently, the voices of the newer gods, with the smell of wild youth,
virile and secretive and stealthy at night. A mixed breed, brought like grain
and fish eggs and sea dye and salt from the farthest strands of Rome's great
stretching net. On the way, they were mingled and mangled and made thereby
more impervious, a richer strain. These gods had the heads of dogs, women's
full breasts, sinewy arms, the claws of birds or great cats; they had braided
dark beards or lank pale hair and cold, opalescent eyes. They had a taste
for bull's blood; their rites were carried out in caves. More secretive than
those dustier gods, they resided in the private parts of people, in their
loins, behind their sweating knees. She heard the jangling of their demands,
and she could feel the bristles in her hand as the bleating head was jerked
up, as the trembling pink throat was sliced; she felt the running warm blood;
she smelled the smoking hair. Those gods were so jealous. They shoved and
jarred for attention, jostling each other for the chance to be known, to
draw the most blood, to have it pouring in their names down the paved roads,
clogging the dust to mud.
Of Water and the Spirit, Malidoma Patrice Some, Penguin, 1994.
A child's first few years are crucial. The grandfather must tell the grandson
what the child said while still a fetus in his mother's womb. Then, he must
gradually help him build a connection with his father, who will help him with
the hard challenges up ahead. My father used to complain that his life was
calamitous because he never knew his grandfather, who disappeared before he
was born. Had he known him, my father said, he would never have lost his first
family, never spent his youth working in a gold mine or later embraced the
Catholic religion with a fervor grander than the one that linked him to his
ancestors. His stepbrothers, who knew their grandfather, did not have the kind
of restlessness that plagued my father. The frustration of a grandfatherless
male child has no cure.
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides, Picador, 2002.
Chekhov's first rule of playwriting goes something like this: "If there's
a gun on the wall in act one, scene one, you must fire the gun by act three,
scene two” 1 can't help thinking about that storytelling precept as I
contemplate the gun beneath my father's pillow. There it is. I can't take it
away now that I've mentioned it. (It really was there that night.) And there
are bullets in the gun and the safety is off. . .
American Bison, Dale Lott, University of California Press, 2003.
Nod-threatening bulls stand close enough to reach one another; their bodies
may form a single straight line or an angle of up to ninety degrees, but
in either case they turn their heads aside. From this position they can attack
suddenly by hooking a horn into the opponent's head. The hook always starts
when the head is close to the ground, the muzzle tucked back. But in the
threat itself, the head-low, muzzle-back position is only a brief interruption
of a head-high stance: the bulls' heads drop in a matched movement, then
swing back up again, still to one side. A hooking attack may start at the
bottom of any one of the down swings, but the opponent never seems to be
caught off guard. After a series of such nods one animal may suddenly submit,
ending the clash.
Lake Effect, Erika Alin, University of MN Press, 2003.
The Minnesota shore is a strangely disjointed place. I cannot help but think
that Crosby would have had a more optimistic view than I do of its present-day
mix of industry and development, on the one hand, and state parks and protected
natural areas, on the other. For me, the dearth of anything but small parcels
of natural sanctity is made all the more lamentable by the startling appeal
of the lava-born rocks and lakeside vistas. With most of the shore in private
hands, state parks often afford the only public access to the lake. Yet even
within their borders, losing myself to the landscape sometimes requires nothing
less than a willful act of denying my surroundings, tuning out the drone of
highway traffic and closing my eyes to people that pack the trails in the summertime.
Lying as it does at the intersection of nature and civilization, the shore
attempts to span horizons that are all but impossible to bridge, tantalizing
yet also coming up short. No matter how visually stunning, a crowded landscape
rarely feels pristine.
This Incomparable Land, Thomas Lyon, Milkweed Editions, 2001
In America, the cutting and burning of the largest deciduous forest on earth
proceeded rapidly and without notable hindrance on either practical or ethical
grounds. The expropriation and, indeed, extirpation of the native inhabitants
over much of their territory was accomplished with few serious objections;
the extermination of the most magnificent assemblage of birds, the passenger
pigeons, and the near extinction of the most astounding assemblage of large
herbivores, the bison, were, records seem to show, largely matters | to which
most Americans were ethically indifferent. What happened, in essence, was that
a people with a strong tradition of righteousness carried off an invasion of
the frontier with remarkable success and little apparent reflection.
Catfish and Mandela, Andrew X Pham, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999.
Dad invited them to stay for dinner, but they were well aware that it was
our very first turkey. The church ladies gave it to us for our holiday feast.
Mom said it was the biggest and funniest-looking chicken she had ever seen.
Everything in America is big, she said, marveling how she couldn't even
hold up the "chicken" with one hand. For days, Mom and Dad had
plotted the cooking of our Christmas dinner. Dad, a serious foodie, had
saved a newspaper recipe. An excellent cook, Mom considered the "fat
chicken" one of the greatest challenges of her kitchen life. On Christmas
day, they orchestrated Operation Turkey. Dad translated the recipes and
helped with the preparations. Convinced that nothing could taste good without
fish-sauce, Mom liberally basted the turkey with it, adding a bit of soy
sauce for coloring. When he wasn't looking, she gave the turkey stuffing
a dose of oyster sauce. Dad quoted the recipe: five hours in the oven. Mom
said that was ridiculous. They quibbled and Mom covertly fiddled with the
oven when Dad took a nap. Between his interpretations and her improvisations,
they produced a frightful thing that resembled a boiled hen dipped in honey.
Dad, an atheist, said a prayer for form and started carving. In sections,
the meat was raw.
The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton, Vintage International, 2002
Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal
conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint
correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to
have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts,
new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall
are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to
think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as
paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. Thinking
improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks—charged with listening
to music, for example, or following a line of trees. The music or the view
distracts for a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which
is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness,
and which runs scared of memories, longings and introspective or original ideas,
preferring instead the administrative and the impersonal.
American Pronghorn, John A. Byers, University of Chicago Press, 1997.
Although the fawn's part of the hiding strategy seems simple, it is actually
a specialized ability. To recline motionless for 4 hours on many cold, wet
spring days at the NBR demands a huge energy expenditure in heat production.
I have always been impressed to find that fawns feel hot when I pick them up
to weigh them, even though they are soaked to the skin on days that pose hypothermia
danger to me. Also, to freeze into complete immobility at the close approach
of a predator demands that a fawn respond in a way opposite to how it will
respond to the same situation 20 days later and for the rest of its life. Finally,
fawns refrain from urinating or defecating until stimulated to do so by the
mother s licking.
Lost in My Own Backyard, Tim Cahill, Crown Publishers 2004
More than likely it was all the result of an ongoing plumbing problem called
the Yellowstone Hotspot. Geologists speculate that the earth’s molten
core sprang a leak about 25 million years ago. A plume of fiery liquefied rock
rose toward the surface of the earth in what is essentially a kind of narrow
chimney. About 10 million years ago the molten rock reached the surface of
the earth, where it spread out in an immense bowl. The writer Bill Bryson has
aptly described the hotspot as looking rather like a martini glass. There are
about forty active hotspots on earth at present. They are all located under
oceans—except for the one under Yellowstone.
Cold Beer and Crocodiles, Roff Smith, National Geographic, 2000.
IT WAS A LONG, HOT, DUSTY ramble down remote bush tracks from Karumba to our
campsite on the Staaten River. In some places the track was little more than
a faint impression in the tall, brown grass that rose above the roofs of the
Land Cruisers. There was no break, just mile after mile of tall grass and termite
mounds and scrubby boxwood trees shimmering in the white-hot glare. It had
been seven months since the last rains fell here. The earth was so dry and
parched in places that when we stopped to open gates even the softest footfalls
raised clouds of ocher bulldust that drifted into our nostrils. It never settled
in that breathless air, but floated like wreaths of smoke. The taste of dust
was everywhere. The effect was stifling. The temperature was a temple-pounding
110°F in the shade and the humidity was oppressive ahead of monsoon, which
typically began around December but could start anytime.
A sudden rainfall would transform this landscape into a vastness of marsh and
mud and shimmering pools dotted with water lilies. Lush tropical grasses would
run riot. Spectacular electrical storms would dance across the horizon. It
would also leave us stranded for weeks. But for now there was just a flaming
sun in an empty sky. The silvery leaves of the boxwoods hung limp. Insects
droned.