Walter Schwan

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D.H. Lawrence
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”
D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

Gish Jen
“He was not what he made up his mind to be. A man was the sum of his limits: freedom only made him see how much so. America was no America.”
Gish Jen

Loren Eiseley
“Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work.

One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.

As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.

He came closer still and called out "Good morning! May I ask what it is that you are doing?"

The young man paused, looked up, and replied "Throwing starfish into the ocean."

"I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" asked the somewhat startled wise man.

To this, the young man replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die."

Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, "But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? You can't possibly make a difference!"

At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water, he said,
"It made a difference for that one.”
Loren Eiseley

Marilynne Robinson
“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Stanley Elkin
“Even the sky a hybrid — here clean and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock.”
Stanley Elkin

year in books
Megan M...
91 books | 84 friends

Jen
Jen
229 books | 66 friends

Genevie...
124 books | 1 friend

Gretche...
33 books | 6 friends

Sue Killip
0 books | 18 friends

Bob Per...
38 books | 4 friends

Laverne...
0 books | 29 friends

Gish Jen
53 books | 243 friends

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