Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays (Nation Books) (Christopher Hitchens)

Amazingly good writing. Given the benefit of hindsight, the essays about the US/Iraq war don't stand up as well as the rest, but what can you do? He stuck to his guns.

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Quotes:

The three crucial broadcasts were made not by Churchill but by an actor hired to impersonate him. Norman Shelley, who played Winnie-the-Pooh for the BBC’s Children’s Hour, ventriloquized Churchill for history and fooled millions of listeners.

At almost every point Churchill was allowed by events to flaunt the medals of his defeats.

Is one to be left with no illusions? Is the whole pageant a cruel put-up job?

Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones.

But alone among his contemporaries, Churchill did not denounce the Nazi empire merely as a threat, actual or potential, to the British one. Nor did he speak of it as a depraved but possibly useful ally. He excoriated it as a wicked and nihilistic thing. That appears facile now, but was exceedingly uncommon then.

People fight, as Kant and Hegel and Nietzsche have emphasized, for dignity and for “recognition” just as much as for their “real” interests.

We seem to have a need, as a species, for something noble and lofty. The task of criticism could be defined as the civilizing of this need—the appreciation of true decency and heroism as against coercive race legends and blood myths.

It is also why one does well to postpone a complete reading until one is in the middle of life, and has shared some of the disillusionments and fears, as well as the delights, that come with this mediocre actuarial accomplishment.

Behind her, a large notice read, THIS JOINT IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF OUR DEAR BROTHER RIVER. Did Mr. Phoenix die in here? “No, honey, but he was an investor.”

On the radio, people who are very obviously products of evolution quarrel at the top of their leathery lungs with the verdict.

About 55,000 men were blown to shreds or died of appalling wounds or expired from thirst and neglect on the Gettysburg field,

IT’S A SOUTHERN THING—YOU WOULDN’T UNDERSTAND. (Why is it, when I see a Confederate battle flag flapping from the rear of a pickup truck, that I don’t axiomatically make the association with courtesy, gentility, chivalry, and hospitality? Perhaps that’s the bit I don’t understand.)

It was one thing for thousands of men to throw away their lives by marching up a slope under heavy fire and insane orders—that’s glory for you—but quite another to think of it as a blunder committed by a vain and fallible old mortal.

The very reason for the imperishability of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, delivered four months later on the same hallowed ground, is that it departed from conventional bombast and oratory, while managing both to honor the past and to summon a common democratic future. (This, in under 300 words.)

The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.

This is a country rather short on irony and long on euphemism,

Every attempt, in other words, to make this “procedure” more rational, more orderly, and more hygienic succeeded only in calling attention to something that I’m now firmly convinced is inescapable—namely, that it’s irrational, random, and befouled and bemerded with the residues of ancient cruelty and superstition.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness.

The greatest triumph modern PR can offer is the transcendent success of having your words and actions judged by your reputation, rather than the other way about.

And, having proposed Zionism as a cure for anti-Semitism, Israel recruits the support of anti-Semitic fundamentalists such as Pat Robertson and Billy Graham, who see the Jewish state as a prelude to the conversion of the Jews, to be followed happily enough by Armageddon and the consigning of the nonconverts to hell.

I care enough about the issue to keep my hatred pure, and to reserve it for those who truly merit it.

The survival of the Jewish people has for centuries been a means of taking the moral temperature of a society. Those who take that temperature are quite rightly conditioned to notice even a slight elevation.

Smart enough even to see that the Promised Land may be a secular multi-ethnic democracy, none the worse for being a second home to many other wanderers and victims, too. America, in a word. The best hope and, yes, perhaps the last one.

However, there are some moral claims for atheism that may be worth putting forward. First, and most conspicuously, the atheist cannot be entirely happy with his conclusion.

Those who decide to try and lead ethical lives without an invisible authority are also ‘blessed’ in another way, because they do not require a church, a priesthood, or a reinforcing dogma or catechism. All that is needed is some elementary fortitude, and the willingness to follow the flickering candle of reason wherever it may lead.

Religion, however, is not the recognition of this private and dutiful attitude. It is its organized eruption from the private into the public realm. It is the elevation and collectivization of credulity and solipsism, and the arrangement of these into institutional dogma and creed. It is the attempt to decide what shall be taught, what shall be allowed by way of sexual conduct and speech and even thought, and what shall be legislated. And it is the attempt to make such decisions beyond challenge, through the invocation of a supernatural authority.

I discover when I read the claims of even the more meek Tillich-like theologians that I am relieved that they are untrue. I would positively detest the all-embracing, refulgent, stress-free embrace that they propose. I have no wish to live in some Disneyland of the mind and spirit, some Nirvana of utter null completeness.

The “truth” is that religious Christians and Jews could still both be wrong. Jerusalem may not be a “holy city” at all, but just an archaeological site that inspires bad behavior. There could be an afterlife and no god, or a god and no afterlife.

One perhaps ought not to wish for hookers, but there are circumstances when corruption is the only hope.

The new talk is all of “human intelligence”: the very faculty in which our ruling class is most deficient.

But then, there is a certain hypocrisy inscribed in the very origins and nature of “Pakistan.” The name is no more than an acronym, confected in the 1930s at Cambridge University by a Muslim propagandist named Chaudhri Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind, plus the suffix “-stan,” meaning “land.” In the Urdu tongue, the resulting word means “Land of the Pure.”

The country is a cobbling together of regional, religious, and ethnic nationalisms, and its founding, in 1947, resulted in Pakistan’s becoming, along with Israel, one of the two “faith-based” states to emerge from the partitionist policy of a dying British colonialism.

Far from being a “Land of the Pure,” Pakistan is one of the clearest demonstrations of the futility of defining a nation by religion, and one of the textbook failures of a state and a society.

Gilead: A Novel (Marilynne Robinson)

Wonderfully wise and serene, the most beautiful book i've read in a long time.

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Quotes:

There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect to find it, either.

When someone remarked in his hearing that he had lost an eye in the Civil War, he said, “I prefer to remember that I have kept one.”

I’d never have believed I’d see a wife of mine doting on a child of mine. It still amazes me every time I think of it. I’m writing this in part to tell you that if you ever wonder what you’ve done in your life, and everyone does wonder sooner or later, you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle.

If only I had the words to tell you.

Each morning I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes—old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable.

I believe that the old man did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all.

These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you’re making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.

will be made. At that level it is a story full of comfort. That is how life goes—we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s.

That is how life goes—we send our children into the wilderness. Some of them on the day they are born, it seems, for all the help we can give them. Some of them seem to be a kind of wilderness unto themselves. But there must be angels there, too, and springs of water. Even that wilderness, the very habitation of jackals, is the Lord’s.

When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?

If I were to multiply the splendors of the world by two—the splendors as I feel them—I would arrive at an idea of heaven very unlike anything you see in the old paintings.

“I tell them there are certain attributes our faith assigns to God: omniscience, omnipotence, justice, and grace. We human beings have such a slight acquaintance with power and knowledge, so little conception of justice, and so slight a capacity for grace, that the workings of these great attributes together is a mystery we cannot hope to penetrate.”

if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There’s a problem in vocabulary.

At that point I began to suspect, as I have from time to time, that grace has a grand laughter in it.

If you want to inform yourselves as to the nature of hell, don’t hold your hand in a candle flame, just ponder the meanest, most desolate place in your soul.

Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.

While I’m thinking of it—when you are an old man like I am, you might think of writing some sort of account of yourself, as I am doing. In my experience of it, age has a tendency to make one’s sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some ways.

Well, we didn’t ask the question, so the question was just taken away from us.

The Time Machine (H. G. Wells)

So exciting! I couldn't stop reading it and went to bed late.

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Quotes:

'You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.'

'Scientific people,' proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, 'know very well that Time is only a kind of Space.

'It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.

Kissing Fish (Roger Wolsey)

A good encyclopedia of liberal Christianity. Perhaps it tries to cover a little too much ground, but it does so with gusto and panache.

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Quotes:

Feel free to read the passages that attract you and skip the others.

Feel free to skip Chapter 1 if you’d rather dig right into the meat of the text. It’s just a bunch of stuff about me and the book isn’t really about me—besides I’m a dork.

Instead of getting people to agree with certain assertions about various dogmas, doctrines, or “truth claims,” progressive Christianity focuses more upon following a certain, radical way of life; namely, following the countercultural, subversive, and life-giving teachings and example of Jesus.

As theologian Walter Wink has pointed out, the pagan Myth of Redemptive Violence was one of the first meta-narratives to pervade human civilization.[187] The myth states that the perceived good guys need to kill or physically punish the perceived bad guys in order for things to be right with the world. This myth has become so thoroughly fused to humanity that it is fair to say that it is our dominant story.

I’m not particularly concerned about my afterlife. It’s my life here and now that matters most to me. I try to live as faithfully as I can and trust that whatever happens when I die will take care of itself.

“The Wesleyan Quadrilateral,” the four factors of Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience

John Wesley spoke to this saying, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.”

John Wesley spoke to this saying, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.” And, “Though we may not all think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart though we may not be of one

John Wesley spoke to this saying, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.” And, “Though we may not all think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart though we may not be of one opinion? If your heart is as my heart, give me thy hand.”

It’s been thousands of years since the books of the Bible were written and it is becoming increasingly difficult for high-tech suburban and city dwellers to understand the writings from foreign, ancient, rural peoples. Reading the Bible well takes a bit of work.

Certain forms of Christianity have become so widespread in the U.S. that even the non-Christians among us have become absorbed by the drama of the notion of a “looming end of the world,” based upon certain interpretations of the book of Revelation in the Bible. Bottom line: progressive Christians think that those interpretations are misguided and based more upon fear than faith.

Kahil Gibran said, “Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.”

I have never united myself to any church, because I have found difficulty in giving my assent, without mental reservation, to the long, complicated statements of Christian doctrine which characterize their articles of belief and confessions of faith. When any church will inscribe over its altars as its sole qualification for membership, the Savior’s condensed statement of the substance of both law and gospel, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself,’ that church will I join with all my heart and all my soul. Abraham Lincoln

There are many different forms of prayer. One can even say that anything from traditional prayers to playing the piano to gardening, rock-climbing, surfing, and riding a motorcycle through the mountains is “prayer.”

The traditional forms of prayer that Christians have engaged in over the years boil down to three concepts, “Thank you” “I’m sorry,” and “Help!”

Being involved in a healthy Christian congregation or community is sort of like being at a military boot camp—but for being trained in how to love instead of how to kill.

Most of the things that we get hung up about are really no big deal. They’re quite inconsequential cosmically speaking. Being aware, awed and amazed at what’s around us can help us to shift away from anxiousness and toward the things that matter—namely, love.

The bottom line is this, when in doubt, do that. God can handle it. God wants us to be authentic. God wants real relationship with real people.

Progressive Christianity is about loving more deeply and living more meaningfully. It’s about following Jesus’ invitations for practicing radical compassion and loving-kindness, living-out Jesus’ Kingdom values, and experiencing a fuller, more profoundly connected and meaningful life. You don’t have to believe in any of the theologies about God that have been used to damn, judge or exclude people. You don’t have to believe in Satan or the Devil. You don’t have to believe in heaven or hell. You don’t have to believe in a virgin birth, or that someone walked on water, or that Christianity is the only way that God is at work in the world (though certain progressive Christians believe several of those things). Instead, it’s about cultivating a sense of appreciation for what God has done for the world though Jesus.

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense. Robert Frost

Hokey Pokey (Jerry Spinelli)

A tender fantasy of growing up; the last day of childhood among the wild bicycle herds.

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Quotes:

It is time.

The four nevers: Never pass a puddle without stomping it. Never go to sleep until the last minute. Never go near Forbidden Hut. Never kiss a girl.

Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories (Sherman Alexie)

Great writing, all Indians, all the time!

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Quotes:

Five bucks, he said, give me five bucks and I’ll give you enough meth to put you on a Vision Quest.

For a half-assed Indian, Junior talked full-on spiritual. Yeah, he was a born-again Indian. At the age of twenty-five, he war-danced for the first time. Around the same day he started dealing drugs.

Whenever an Indian says he’s traditional, you know that Indian is full of shit.

Powwow is like high school, except with more feathers and beads.

I do love you, I said, but I don’t love you enough to save you.

He reduced Jeri all the way down to the sacred parts of her anatomy. And those parts stop being sacred when you talk blasphemy about them.

It seemed that every Indian knew all the lyrics to every Hank Williams song ever recorded. Hank was our Jesus, Patsy Cline was our Virgin Mary, and Freddy Fender, George Jones, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Ronnie Milsap, Tanya Tucker, Marty Robbins, Johnny Horton, Donna Fargo, and Charlie Rich were our disciples.

Indians hardly ever travel in a straight line,

Take care of each other is what my dreams were saying. Take care of each other.”

“We are all given one thing by which our lives are measured, one determination. Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world. It doesn’t matter which as long as I continue to tell the stories. My father, he died on Okinawa in World War II, died fighting for this country, which had tried to kill him for years. My mother, she died giving birth to me, died while I was still inside her. She pushed me out into the world with her last breath. I have no brothers or sisters. I have only my stories which came to me before I even had the words to speak. I learned a thousand stories before I took my first thousand steps. They are all I have. It’s all I can do.”

Joey and Big Ed loved each other with the kind of straight-boy-devotion that started wars, terror attacks, and video game companies.

Every man must have his secrets, right? And every man was supposed to ignore every other man’s secrets. That’s how the game was supposed to be played.

Basketball Presbyterians

And being funny was sometimes a way of being dishonest.

Maybe being funny was usually a way of being honest.

And we laughed, you know, because sometimes that’s all two people have in common.

Low Man believed the Coeur d’Alene Reservation to be a monotonous place—a wet kind of monotony that white tourists saw as spiritual and magic.

Whites and Indians laughed at most of the same jokes, but they laughed for different reasons.

In Sara’s voice, the others heard something new: an adulthood ceremony taking place between syllables.

Nothing happened, of course. Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental and inconsequential.

She wished that she could be called Coeur d’Alene as a description, rather than as an excuse, reason, prescription, placebo, prediction, or diminutive. She only wanted to be understood as eccentric and complicated!

And didn’t they deserve better, these white salesmen and middle managers, these twenty-first century Willy Lomans, who only wanted to be better men than their fathers had been? Of course, thought Mary Lynn, these sons definitely deserved better—they were smarter and more tender and generous than all previous generations of white American men—but they’d never receive their just rewards, and thus their anger was justified and banal.

If white people are the mad scientists who created race, thought Jeremiah, then we created race so we could enslave black people and kill Indians, and now race has become the Frankenstein monster that has grown beyond our control.

Jeremiah turned from the water and walked away from the crowd. He knew that people could want death as much as they wanted anything else. What did Jeremiah want? Did he want his wife? Did she want him? After all these

She believed in the endless nature of human possibility. She would be delighted if these two messy humans transcended their stereotypes and revealed themselves as mortal angels.

White people, no matter how smart, were too romantic about Indians. White people looked at the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the full moon, newborn babies, and Indians with the same goofy sentimentalism.

It’s tough to share a bathroom with an Indian and continue to romanticize her.

She knew there would come a day when white folks finally understood that Indians are every bit as relentlessly boring, selfish, and smelly as they are, and that would be a wonderful day for human rights but a terrible day for Corliss.

Sure, they were men raised in a matriarchal culture, but they lived in a patriarchal country. Therefore, they were kind and decent and sensitive and stupid and sexist and unpredictable.

“Indian is easy to fake. People have been faking it for five hundred years.

He was one of those rare men who did not monologue his way through life.

Because they don’t want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian people sew flaws into their powwow regalia. My family always sewed one yellow bead somewhere on their regalia. But we always hid it where you had to search hard to find it.

“The two funniest tribes I’ve ever been around are Indians and Jews, so I guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide.”

Do you know how many good men live in this world? Too many to count!

The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle)

It took me a while to finish reading this. The first chapter is very exciting, and the book slows down considerably after that. Still, i read it. E. T. straddles Christianity and Buddhism without really belonging in either, and this book will be interesting to Christians interested in delving a little into Buddhist thinking about pain, and attaining enlightenment by surrender.

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Quotes:

“Mumbo jumbo” was all that Time magazine could see in a book that countless people around the globe found life-changing.

I have little use for the past and rarely think about it;

A time came when, for a while, I was left with nothing on the physical plane. I had no relationships, no job, no home, no socially defined identity. I spent almost two years sitting on park benches in a state of the most intense joy.

I cannot tell you any spiritual truth that deep within you don’t know already. All I can do is remind you of what you have forgotten.

Let me ask you this: can you be free of your mind whenever you want to? Have you found the “off” button?

This is the essence of meditation. In your everyday life, you can practice this by taking any routine activity that normally is only a means to an end and giving it your fullest attention, so that it becomes an end in itself. For example, every time you walk up and down the stairs in your house or place of work, pay close attention to every step, every movement, even your breathing. Be totally present.

When you do use your mind, and particularly when a creative solution is needed, you oscillate every few minutes or so between thought and stillness, between mind and no-mind. No-mind is consciousness without thought.

All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.

So don’t seek to become free of desire or “achieve” enlightenment. Become present. Be there as the observer of the mind. Instead of quoting the Buddha, be the Buddha, be “the awakened one,” which is what the word buddha means.

Whereas before you dwelt in time and paid brief visits to the Now, have your dwelling place in the Now and pay brief visits to past and future when required to deal with the practical aspects of your life situation.

You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.

Watch out for any kind of defensiveness within yourself. What are you defending? An illusory identity, an image in your mind, a fictitious entity.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength.

Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to “die before you die” — and find that there is no death.

The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind.

Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion.

You haven’t yet grasped the essence of what I am saying because you are trying to understand it mentally. The mind cannot understand this. Only you can. Please just listen.

Are you always trying to get somewhere other than where you are? Is most of your doing just a means to an end? Is fulfillment always just around the corner or confined to short-lived pleasures, such as sex, food, drink, drugs, or thrills and excitement? Are you always focused on becoming, achieving, and attaining, or alternatively chasing some new thrill or pleasure? Do you believe that if you acquire more things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or psychologically complete? Are you waiting for a man or woman to give meaning to your life?

I cannot believe that I could ever reach a point where I am completely free of my problems. You are right. You can never reach that point because you are at that point now.

When you are full of problems, there is no room for anything new to enter, no room for a solution. So whenever you can, make some room, create some space, so that you find the life underneath your life situation.

Wherever you are, be there totally.

Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.

If you take any action — leaving or changing your situation — drop the negativity first, if at all possible. Action arising out of insight into what is required is more effective than action arising out of negativity.

Die to the past every moment. You don’t need it. Only refer to it when it is absolutely relevant to the present.

If there is no joy, ease, or lightness in what you are doing, it does not necessarily mean that you need to change what you are doing. It may be sufficient to change the how. “How” is always more important than “what.”

Something could happen at any moment, and if you are not absolutely awake, absolutely still, you will miss it. This is the kind of waiting Jesus talks about.

Of course there is something wrong with you — and you are not being judged. I don’t mean to offend you personally, but do you not belong to the human race that killed over one hundred million members of its own species in the twentieth century alone?

But that is only the beginning of an inward journey that will take you ever more deeply into a realm of great stillness and peace, yet also of great power and vibrant life. At first, you may only get fleeting glimpses of it, but through them you will begin to realize that you are not just a meaningless fragment in an alien universe, briefly suspended between birth and death, allowed a few short-lived pleasures followed by pain and ultimate annihilation. Underneath your outer form, you are connected with something so vast, so immeasurable and sacred, that it cannot be conceived or spoken of

The fact is that no one has ever become enlightened through denying or fighting the body or through an out-of-body experience.

Chi is movement; the Unmanifested is stillness.

Now let your spiritual practice be this: As you go about your life, don’t give 100 percent of your attention to the external world and to your mind. Keep some within.

Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, every word.

it has been said that nothing in this world is so like God as silence.

“Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”

Only when sound appears does silence come into being.

So whenever your relationship is not working, whenever it brings out the “madness” in you and in your partner, be glad. What was unconscious is being brought up to the light. It is an opportunity for salvation.

Every moment, hold the knowing of that moment, particularly of your inner state. If there is anger, know that there is anger. If there is jealousy, defensiveness, the urge to argue, the need to be right, an inner child demanding love and attention, or emotional pain of any kind — whatever it is, know the reality of that moment and hold the knowing. The relationship then becomes your sadhana, your spiritual practice.

It is not easy to live with an enlightened person, or rather it is so easy that the ego finds it extremely threatening.

This is not being negative. It is simply recognizing the nature of things, so that you don’t pursue an illusion for the rest of your life.

Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being.

Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of God.

Full attention is full acceptance, is surrender.

The acceptance of suffering is a journey into death. Facing deep pain, allowing it to be, taking your attention into it, is to enter death consciously. When you have died this death, you realize that there is no death — and there is nothing to fear. Only the ego dies.

How will I know when I have surrendered? When you no longer need to ask the question.

On the Road with the Archangel (Frederick Buechner)

Only Buechner could have pulled this out: a novelization of the apocriphal book of Tobit. He does pull it off, the story is great, and it has a dog in it (and a monster fish too). I laughed, then cried, then read the original. It's really all there!

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Quotes:

I AM RAPHAEL, ONE OF THE SEVEN ARCHANGELS WHO PASS IN and out of the presence of the Holy One, blessed be he. I bring him the prayers of all who pray and of those who don’t even know that they’re praying.

How can I put into the language of men what the dog had seen when he had taken his look? A forked fire? A gathering of light that is always moving and always still? A pair of wings such as a dream might wear if the dream were a bird? Something like that anyway, or nothing at all like that. He saw the prayer carrier anyway. He saw Raphael.

The dog saw instantly through my disguise. He flattened himself out on his front paws with his chest on the ground and his neck arched upward so he could see into my eyes. What I saw in his was as gracious a prayer as any I have ever set down at the feet of Glory. He asked nothing for himself or for any of his four-footed kind but only that all should be well with his master.

What they saw of me was about as much as a child’s hand can hold of the sea, but it was enough. A fire burned before them like no other fire. A fragrance fresher than the roses of Sharon filled the air, and the leaves of the trees tossed like plumes though there was no wind stirring. There was the sound of as many voices singing as there are stars in the sky. There was a silence deeper than the deepest well. Their wonder was so great that they both hid their faces in their hands. Even the dog placed his paws over his eyes. “Don’t be afraid,” I told them, and when finally they took their hands from their faces, I was gone.

If was the hinge that the fate of the whole world hung on.

Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh)

What a pleasure to read this with Laura! The brutal chapter about the visit to Ole Golly's Mom happens early in the story than i had remembered. I love it that we see this brilliant but far from perfect girl learn an important lesson and grow up a little, but by the end of the book we know she still has a way to go.

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A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume I (Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev)

Beautifully subversive, great use of the slightly unreliable narrator. Wonderful descriptions of Russian life. Suggested by Helen Roche (thanks!)

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Quotes:

'A peasant woman—is a labourer,' said Hor seriously; 'she is the peasant's servant.'

Your heart is weary with suspense, when suddenly—but only sportsmen can understand me—suddenly in the deep hush there is a peculiar croaking and whirring sound, the measured sweep of swift wings is heard, and the snipe, gracefully bending its long beak, sails smoothly down behind a dark bush to meet your shot.

Fyodor Miheitch got up at once from his chair, fetched a wretched little fiddle from the window, took the bow—not by the end, as is usual, but by the middle—put the fiddle to his chest, shut his eyes, and fell to dancing, singing a song, and scraping on the strings.

We may observe, by the way, that ever since Russia has existed, there has never yet been an instance of a man who has grown rich and prosperous without a big, bushy beard;

I'm a plain man—I go on the old system. To my ideas, when a man's master—he's master; and when he's peasant—he's peasant. … That's what I think about it.'