“Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his honor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine.”
― Walden & Civil Disobedience
― Walden & Civil Disobedience
“Magic happens when you head out into the unknown with wonder in your right hand and terror in your left.”
― No Baggage: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering
― No Baggage: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering
“It was said that their purring could patch a pail of broken bones back together and revive a fossilized soul; yet when their work was done, cats would go their own way without a backward glance. They loved without reticence, no strings attached—but no promises either.”
― The Little Paris Bookshop
― The Little Paris Bookshop
“Everything is, in any event, fated to disappear. Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.”
― No Baggage: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering
― No Baggage: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering
“I’m a firm believer that you have to taste a country’s soul to understand it and to grasp its people. And by soul I mean what grows there, what its people see and smell and touch every day, what travels through them and shapes them from the inside out.”
― The Little Paris Bookshop
― The Little Paris Bookshop
Curtis’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Curtis’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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