Sign in with Facebook
9,857 books
—
21,934 voters
“The sperm whales' network of female-based family unit resembled, to a remarkable extent, the community the whalemen had left back home on Nantucket. In both societies the males were itinerants. In their dedication to killing sperm whales the Nantucketers had developed a system of social relationships that mimicked those of their prey.”
― In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
― In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
“What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.”
― The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
― The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
“It was I who had failed in my understanding, you see. Life holds a sanctity for them (referring to Solomon Islanders) we can scarcely begin to imagine; it therefore struck them as absurd that someone would choose to end it. A great ludicrous act. In any case, it was then I recognized that my own values - the tenets I hold dear as an Englishman - they were not the only, nor the best values in existence. I understood there were many ways of being in the world, that to privilege one rigid set of beliefs over another was to lose something. Everything is bizarre, and everything has value. Or if not value, at least merits investigation.”
― Washington Black
― Washington Black
“No matter how much the inhabitants might try to hide it, there was a savagery about this island, a bloodlust and pride that bound every mother, father, and child in a clannish commitment to the hunt.”
― In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
― In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex
“Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world.”
―
―
Tumblr
— 118 members
— last activity Jan 21, 2017 01:52PM
Tumblr? Tumblr you say? Yeah. You know you want one, or you have one. Might as well join, get followers, find followers, and make new friends. :)
Sean’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Sean’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Polls voted on by Sean
Lists liked by Sean
