Jessica > Recent Status Updates

Thanks, Chuck!

Time for a re-read.

"There's something about first love, isn't there? she said. It's untouchable to those who played no part in it. But it's the measure of all that follows."

Follow the Yellow Brick Road, Ell! ....

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring

I would keep on loving you more and more. I shall love you with the constancy with which the waves flood the shore before retreating again. I shall love you with the constancy with which pole star shines. I shall love you like my child, my sister, my lover, and my friend, like my wife, my accomplice, and my bed. Yes, my bed. Up until now. It has been my only home but I shall love you because you are my home.

Francis struggled to keep a straight face. "Most people don't have enough money for nooks. Also, you read them once and then what? Books are like villas in Saint Tropez."
"Big, beautiful, and awfully lonely in winter?" Marie-Jeanne asked.

"To speak is to stumble, to hesitate, to detour and hut dead ends. To listen is straightforward. You can always just listen."

The opening credits of The Office come from John Krasinkski's visit to Scranton right after he got the part. He was so excited he drove 2 hours to the town to immerse himself and took videos as he drove around. He even went to a paper company and interviewed their boss.

"Gamache again marveled at the people who chose to live in this area. Was Margaret Atwood a garbage collector perhaps? Or maybe Prime Minister Mulroney had picked up a second career delivering the mail. No one was who they seemed. Everyone was more. And one person in this room was very much more."

"CHEMISTRY IS CHANGE...Whenever you start doubting yourself...just remember. Courage is the root of change--and change is what we're chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back .... no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, status, religion …. do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies. Design your own future."

"In the years after the family's departure, I wore the cloak of their absence. Records Erica might like. A doll that might catch India's eye. And ice cream they both loved. The gap opened wider and wider until 10 years turned into 20, 30, 40."

Part II: Shaking the Tree
I spent the 1st half of Part I very confused but curious about what was going on. I spent the 2nd half of part 1 less confused...and less curious.

"I've always known, on a purely intellectual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We're all made of the same thing -- the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. I've just never felt that knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you."

"But all this confirms is that searching for 'the origins of inequality' is really asking the wrong question. If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on regular basis, maybe the real question should be 'how did we get stuck?'"

Oops, added the quote to the wrong book post! See quote under the other orange book I'm reading... :-D

"Strong regional traits developed. The result probably would have struck a modern observer as something more akin to a world inhabited by hobbits, giants and elves than anything we have direct experience of today, or in the more recent past. Those elements that make up modern human...seem only to have come together quite late in the process."

" 'In life you have to learn to count the good days. You have to tuck them in your pocket and carry them around with you. So I'm putting today in my pocket and I'm off to bed.' "

"I had to do the harder English, which was a time suck, reading books. Some of them though, I finished without meaning to. ... Likewise the Charles Dickens one, seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat's ass. You'd think he was from around here."

Once upon a time we had our honest living that was God and country. Then the world turns and there's no God anymore, no country, but it's still in your blood that coal is God's gift and you want to believe. Because otherwise it was one more scam and the [eff]-train that's railroaded over these mountains since George Washington rode in and set his crew to cutting down our trees. Everything that could be taken is gone.

This writing's fantastic. " 'He had much to say.... Stoner had learned a lot from him and Mom going to their counseling. New words to help us all get along. Opposition disorder being one of them. Supposedly that was a disease and I had it. If I wanted to move in here I'd need to get on the medication to knock some of the wind out of my sails. Evidently I had too much of that in my sales. Wind.' "

Friends was originally titled Friends Like Us.

His dad was The Old Spice man in the commercials. He saw him on commercials more than irl.

I Bet the Trees are Thinking, by Rudy Francisco
If they're willing to pay/ three dollars a gallon for gas,/ imagine how much we can/ charge them for oxygen.

I Bet the Trees are Thinking, by Rudy Francisco
If they're willing to pay/ three dollars a gallon for gas,/ imagine how much we can/ charge them for oxygen.

The book is 4 days overdue, but I'm going to finish it soon!

This book is due tomorrow, with no renewals since there are 100 people waiting on the copies. I may keep it and try to finish...

"Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi" One of Munro's characters quotes Horace. Carpe diem indeed!