"The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I've come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers..."
- Lynne Sharon Schwartz
"I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?"
"Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.the Tai Chi instructor"
"Does being true to one's self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one's self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between ..."
"Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell."
"What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever..."
"I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, ..."
"Reading teaches us receptivity....It teaches us to receive, in stillness and attentiveness, a voice possessed temporarily, on loan....And as we grow accustomed to receiving books in stillness and atte..."
"Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breath the air, transforming it into energy, motion. Da..."
"How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself--the task of a lifetime--becomes the answer."