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162 reviews

David Mccracken

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David’s Bookshelves

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David’s Notes & Highlights

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

4 highlights

I felt glad to see that life was going on—actual life, where people were working and staying awake and trying to accomplish things, which was the point of coffee.

The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

5 highlights
Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy

by Stephen Wertheim

9 highlights

See David Mccracken’s 4 books with notes and highlights…

“It may be—I will argue so—that communication outward is only a secondary, socially stimulated phase in the acquisition of language. Speaking to oneself would be the primary function (considered by L. S. Vygotsky in the early 1930s, this profoundly suggestive hypothesis has received little serious examination since).”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

2 likes

“And suddenly, in view of these reflections, Ulrich had to smile and admit to himself that he was, after all, a character, even without having one.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

5 likes

“Language is the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is.”
― George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation

5 likes

“It was now that I began sensibly to feel how much more happy this life I now led was, with all its miserable circumstances, than the wicked, cursed, abominable life I led all the past part of my days; and now I changed both my sorrows and my joys; my very desires altered, my affections changed their gusts, and my delights were perfectly new from what they were at my first coming, or, indeed, for the two years past.”
― Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

1 likes

“In the right circumstances, a man can help himself by writing a book about his point, or a pamphlet, or at least a letter to the editor, thereby putting his protest on the historical record, which is marvelously comforting even if nobody reads it. Usually, however, it can be counted on to attract the attention of a few readers who assure the author that he is a new Copernicus, whereupon they introduce themselves as unrecognized Newtons. This custom of picking points out of each other's fur is widespread and a great comfort, but it is without lasting effect because the participants soon fall to quarreling and find themselves isolated again.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

7 likes

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