Alyssa Miller’s Reviews > Poison for Breakfast > Status Update

“We should have conversations, real and imaginary, with translators handy so that everybody might understand everything we say. We may feel native to where we are, or feel displaced, or both, the way someone going on a journey is also a stranger in town, but nevertheless we should keep reading.”

“We must try, all of us, a lot of the time, our best, and we must keep trying. We do not understand anything but we should try our best to understand each other. We should swim and walk in parks, thinking. We should watch movies and think about what might happen. We should buy food and think about where it comes from, and we should listen to music and wonder what it means.”

“‘Countless writers express countless ideas on so many bits of paper, and at some unknown moment some specific book, even some specific sentence, will be the right one for the right person. We never know when some scrap of literature will have its finest hour.’
‘So what do we do?’ I asked …
‘We keep reading,’ the librarian said firmly.”

“It is difficult for me to exaggerate how much I love a library. It is not impossible, of course, because I am a writer, and writers can exaggerate anything.”

"Zeno was an ancient Greek philosopher who ended up being tortured by people who didn't like his ideas. Nowadays philosophers are hardly ever tortured, because most people ignore them completely, and it's hard to say which is the worse fate for philosophy and the people who practice it, being tortured or being ignored."

“I like to think of my finest hour as an actual hour in which I am at my most true and good. I don’t know when this hour is, whether it is in my future or if it went by unnoticed in my past, but I keep watch for those sixty shiny minutes. I know they are somewhere.”

“It is a description I admire very much…so startling that you know no one else has thought of it before the author did, & yet so perfectly clear that you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. All good writing is like this. It is why a favorite book feels like an old friend & a new acquaintance at the same time, & the reason a favorite author can be a familiar figure & a mysterious stranger all at once.”