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sean is Currently Reading

sean is currently reading

(Blue Pastures) By Mary Oliver (Author) Paperback on (Nov , 1995)

by Mary Oliver

bookshelves: currently-reading, 2026, poetry

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May 06, 2026 01:00AM

sean is currently reading

The GR5 Trail - Through the French Alps: From Lake Geneva to Nice, including GR52 to Menton

by Paddy Dillon

bookshelves: currently-reading

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Apr 20, 2026 08:12AM

sean is currently reading

If you only walk long enough: Exploring the Pyrenees

by Steve Cracknell (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: hiking-outdoors, france, currently-reading, 2026

Reading for the 2nd time

read in May 2019

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progress:

(75%)
— May 12, 2019 09:50AM

May 12, 2019 03:01PM

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sean’s Notes & Highlights

Crow (Animal Series) by Boria Sax

1 highlight

The carrion crow is almost entirely black, though its feathers show a purple or green gloss in certain lights. The hooded crow has a large area of pale grey on the back of the neck and lower breast. Otherwise, the two subspecies are almost ...more

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sean’s Quotes

“What is admired is success, achievement, the quality of performance,” writes the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “rather than the quality of experience.” But what if we don’t want to become virtuoso musicians or renowned artists? What if we only want to dabble in these things, to see if they might subtly change our outlook on the world or even, as we try to learn them, change us? What if we just want to enjoy them?”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

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“Once in a while, she said, the patients put on a theatrical show here, and beneath the stage a magnificent grand piano awaited the next production or display of the musical talents of an inmate. I congratulated her on this impressive piece of furniture and she smiled with pleasure. A moment later she was called away, and idly lifting the lid over the keyboard I was faced with the fact that the piano possessed no keys. It was a discovery which at that moment seemed of extreme symbolical significance.”
― Norman Lewis, A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India

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“There is a strong and fairly substantial theory in India as elsewhere that the gypsies of Europe originated in tribes driven out by Indian population displacements of the remote past.”
― Norman Lewis, A Goddess in the Stones: Travels in India

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“Medieval technology could raise marvels of architecture 200 feet in the air, it could conceive the mechanics of a loom capable of weaving patterned cloth, and of a gearshaft capable of harnessing the insubstantial air to turn a heavy millstone, but it failed to conceive the fore-and-aft rig and swinging boom capable of adapting sails to the direction of the wind. By such accident of the human mind, war, trade, and history are shaped.”
― Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

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“That word, which has an almost entirely pejorative meaning today as a hopelessly superficial dabbler, is derived from the Italian dilettare, which means “to delight.” As the art historian Bruce Redford notes, “dilettante”—one who exhibits delight—entered English with the formation of the Society of Dilettanti, an eighteenth-century group of Englishmen who had returned from the grand tour brimming with enthusiasm for Continental art and culture. As the process of acquiring knowledge gradually became more specialized, Redford notes, the meaning of the word shifted. By the time George Eliot wrote Middlemarch in the early 1870s, the word had become an insult.”
― Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning

tags: dilettante, lifelong-learning

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