Kathy

“Passer-by,
To love is to find your own soul
Through the soul of the beloved one.

-- quoted from Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“The problem with retrospect is it never shows up beforehand.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“I used to race through books one after another, but in Book Club Harriet taught us that when you slow down, you notice more, and when you notice more, you feel more. Reading one book makes it part of all the books you've ever read, Harriet said, so she was forever dragging other books into our discussions.

QUESTION: If Gatsby had a brother like Ethan Frome, would he have made the same mistakes?

QUESTION: If Frank and Zooey could speak from the Spoon River graveyard, which one would tell the story, which the "meanwhile"?”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book

“We'd been discussing Spoon River Anthology -- a womanly discussion about life and legacy and the bottomless currents that burble beneath even the simplest existence. That's Harriet's word: burble. We'd been reading aloud, back and forth, remarking how the characters chose to record their brief time in this ever-moving stream. A few tried to capture the whole winding length of it, but most settled on the rocks and ripples -- a moment, a day, an especially fraught or tender time. Some recalled their death, some their life. Some relived their worst, some their best. All of them, though (Harriet and I both noticed this), seemed compelled to make some sort of accounting, convincing those still living that they, too, had lived, and not in vain.”
― Monica Wood, How to Read a Book