Melissa

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Melissa.

http://infinitedetours.tumblr.com

VC: An American H...
Melissa is currently reading
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
City of Thieves
Melissa is currently reading
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
The Colonizer and...
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
See all 12 books that Melissa is reading…
Loading...
Daniel James Brown
“Years later, as old men, they all remembered the moment. Bobby Moch recalled, “You couldn’t hear anything except for the oars going in the water . . . it’d be a ‘zep’ and that’s all you could hear . . . the oarlocks didn’t even rattle on the release.” They were rowing perfectly, fluidly, mindlessly. They were rowing as if on another plane, as if in a black void among the stars, just as Pocock had said they might. And it was beautiful.”
Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Daniel James Brown
“The common denominator in all these conditions—whether in the lungs, the muscles, or the bones—is overwhelming pain. And that is perhaps the first and most fundamental thing that all novice oarsmen must learn about competitive rowing in the upper echelons of the sport: that pain is part and parcel of the deal. It’s not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it’s a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you.”
Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Daniel James Brown
“Pocock paused and stepped back from the frame of the shell and put his hands on his hips, carefully studying the work he had so far done. He said for him the craft of building a boat was like religion. It wasn’t enough to master the technical details of it. You had to give yourself up to it spiritually; you had to surrender yourself absolutely to it. When you were done and walked away from the boat, you had to feel that you had left a piece of yourself behind in it forever, a bit of your heart. He turned to Joe. “Rowing,” he said, “is like that. And a lot of life is like that too, the parts that really matter anyway. Do you know what I mean, Joe?”
Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics

Daniel James Brown
“And he came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust and affection, if nurtured correctly, might lift a crew above the ordinary sphere, transport it to a place where nine boys somehow became one thing - a thing that could not quite be defined, a thing that was so in tune with the water and the earth and the sky above that, as they rowed, effort was replaced by ecstasy. It was a rare thing, a sacred thing, a thing devoutly to be hoped for.
p 48”
Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
tags: unity

“What economists and political scientists today call the “rational choice of individuals,” but what Smith called “the individual pursuit of happiness,” leads according to this view in a mechanical way to general welfare. As Alexander Pope in his Essay on Man put it: “true Self Love and Social are the same.” While this is the foundation of liberal capitalism, Marx’s dialectical materialism is not different in its selection of the economy as the prime mover. In this way the economy becomes the most important purpose of society. Fortunately, the economy has laws of causation, or, at least, that is what economists would like us to believe. Statistics are gathered to provide an objectified view of reality that enables social engineering. The individual and the collective are simultaneously put in an economic framework that is secular not in the sense that it is nonreligious, since individuals can rationally pursue religious ends, but in the sense that a God-given order of society has been replaced by an order that is constantly produced by homo economicus” (p. 41).”
Peter van der Veer, The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India

year in books
Emily
997 books | 150 friends

Wandering
3,053 books | 306 friends

Cam Nelson
675 books | 100 friends

Tom Wolfe
436 books | 91 friends

Gus  Ostow
693 books | 87 friends

Marissa
591 books | 505 friends

Emily
752 books | 134 friends

Eden Ka...
390 books | 376 friends

More friends…



Polls voted on by Melissa

Lists liked by Melissa