AltLovesBooks

“There’s a lot I will never adopt from my Amish neighbors (long black pants in summer and a cap on education at eighth-grade spring to mind), but Sam opened my eyes to the difference between rules that hold you back and rules that help you grow. That was why he could read thrillers if he felt like it and had no qualms telling me that he’d seen (and kind of enjoyed) the movie Witness . Amos, our closest neighbor over the hill, dropped in one evening while friends were over for dinner. “This is wine?” he asked, never having seen it before. “Can I try?” Before I could reach for the bottle, he’d filled a water glass to the brim. He drank it off like it was lemonade, then set off to walk tipsily home in the dark. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll be having that again,” Amos told me the next day. “Not enough evenings in life to spoil another one.” The Amish aren’t closed to the world, he’s saying; they’re just a little more goal-oriented about how much of it to let in.”
― Christopher McDougall, Running with Sherman

“There are no poetry enshrined freighters on the sea now. It is a prosy life when we have no time to bid one another good morning.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“I found no fault with the cook, and it was the rule of the voyage that the cook found no fault with me. There was never a ship’s crew so well agreed.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World

“If a man's foes were of his own household, Gamache knew that his friends were too.”
― Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities