Yair > Recent Status Updates

"Almost like a child, I sometimes thought, like a prodigious child playing with his toys."

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 55). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Ambitious reading, some glorious catching up with old favorite writers, engages the mind like little else.

"No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood."

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 40). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"Sachs automatically assumed great intelligence on the part of the person he was talking to, thereby investing that person with a sense of his own dignity and importance. I think it was that quality I admired most about him, that innate skill at drawing out the best in others."

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 19). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“I don’t read many novels,” the agent said. “I never seem to have time for them.” “No, not many people do,” I said.

Auster, Paul. Leviathan (p. 7). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"I see what Eeyore means," said Owl. "If you ask me——"

"I'm not asking anybody," said Eeyore. "I'm just telling everybody. We can look for the North Pole, or we can play 'Here we go gathering Nuts and May' with the end part of an ant's nest. It's all the same to me."

A.A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh (pp. 82-83). Kindle Edition.

"Oh, Bear!" said Christopher Robin. "How I do love you!"

"So do I," said Pooh.

A.A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh (p. 47). Kindle Edition.

"Isn't it funny
How a bear likes honey?
Buzz! Buzz! Buzz!
I wonder why he does?"

A.A. Milne. Winnie-the-Pooh (p. 4). Kindle Edition.

"You are no great hand at ANYTHING, I think."

"What does that matter? God has made me so."

Gogol, Nikolai. The Works of Nikolai Gogol (Annotated with Biography) . Golgotha Press. Kindle Edition.

Soon, sleep comes and I let it take me. I dream of things I can’t remember later.

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 341). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“My boys,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘Daddy, Daddy, please buy us bicycles and we’ll not trouble you. Please, Daddy!’” He gave a short laugh through his nose. “Bicycles. Their mother will kill me, I swear to you.”

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 309). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"Piss on the beards of all those self-righteous monkeys. They do nothing but thumb their rosaries and recite a book written in a tongue they don’t even understand. God help us all if Afghanistan ever falls into their hands."

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 266). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"The streets are full enough already of hungry orphans and every day I thank Allah that I am alive, not because I fear death, but because my wife has a husband and my son is not an orphan."

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 215). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"IN THE SUMMER of 1988, about six months before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, I finished my first novel, a father-son story set in Kabul, written mostly with the typewriter the general had given me."

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 181). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"I envied her. Her secret was out. Spoken. Dealt with. I opened my mouth and almost told her how I’d betrayed Hassan, lied, driven him out, and destroyed a forty-year relationship between Baba and Ali. But I didn’t. I suspected there were many ways in which Soraya Taheri was a better person than me. Courage was just one of them."

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 165). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“Then congratulations, you are already halfway to being a man,” he said with no trace of humor, no irony, the compliment of the casually arrogant.

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 141). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"But may I ask HOW you desire to purchase those peasants?" asked Manilov. "With land, or merely as souls for transferment--that is to say, by themselves, and without any land?" "I want the peasants themselves only," replied Chichikov. "And I want dead ones at that."

-Dead Souls

Gogol, Nikolai. The Works of Nikolai Gogol (Annotated with Biography) . Golgotha Press. Kindle Edition.

"In the department of--but it is better not to mention the department. There is nothing more irritable than departments, regiments, courts of justice, and, in a word, every branch of public service."

Gogol, Nikolai. The Works of Nikolai Gogol (Annotated with Biography) . Golgotha Press. Kindle Edition.

He said it to Karim, but looked directly at the Russian officer. “Ask him where his shame is.” They spoke. “He says this is war. There is no shame in war.”

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 117). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

McCarthy's best? Possibly, this is only number five of his for me, but this is damn good.

He stopped, turned. He cupped his hands around his mouth. “For you a thousand times over!”

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 71). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“You know…I like where I live.” He was always doing that, reading my mind.

“It’s my home.” “Whatever,” I said. “Get ready to lose again.”

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 63). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

“And where is he headed?” Baba said. “A boy who won’t stand up for himself becomes a man who can’t stand up to anything.”

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 29). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

"On a high mountain I stood,
And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God. O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men, Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts."

Hosseini, Khaled. The Kite Runner (p. 17). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Setting up a storygraph account. Goodreads was/is nice, but without direct messaging (among other things) it feels like the site is giving up. Look me up on storygraph if you care to.

"He did not hesitate to plunge the South and the Islands into a terrifying commercial crisis, so long as he was able to reinforce the industry which could give the country a real independence, and which would expand the cadres of the dominant social group: this is the policy of manufacturing the manufacturer."

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison notebooks - Gramsci (p. 80). Lebooks Editora. Kindle Edition.

But born into a backward peasant environment and deprived of either an adequate or a continuous education, Gramsci's success in school and university despite constant ill-health, under-nourishment and over-work was a triumph of intellectual purpose. Something of his individual experience is thus carried over into his repeated emphasis on learning as work.

Gramsci, Antonio. Prison notebooks - Gramsci (p. 35).