Starstruck
Sunday brunch: Links for the week of 7 April-13 April 2013
I don’t do links every week, but that just makes the weeks I do even more special!
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What I bought – 9 September 2010
“They were lovers of peace,” Gaudior replied shortly. “Your planet does not deal gently with lovers of peace.” (Madeleine L’Engle, from A Swiftly Tilting Planet)
What I bought – 4 August 2010
“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh,” said Piglet at last, “what’s the first thing you say to yourself?”
“What’s for breakfast?” said Pooh. “What do you say, Piglet?”
“I say, I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?” said Piglet.
Pooh nodded thoughtfully.
“It’s the same thing,” he said. (A. A. Milne, from Winnie-the-Pooh)
What I bought – 8 July 2010
Actually, his statement in its entirety was, “The rich are the most discriminated-against minority in the world. Openly or covertly, everybody hates the rich because, openly or covertly, everybody envies the rich. Me, I love the rich. Somebody has to love them. Sure, a lot o’ rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o’ poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks.” (Tom Robbins, from Jitterbug Perfume)
What I bought – 3 June 2010
“To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half our battle would be won then; the disintegration of the old morality would have set in in its very temple.” (Joseph Conrad, from The Secret Agent)
What I bought – 12 May 2010
You go all your life thinking of your parents as these crushing protective monsters with infinite power over you, and then there’s a day when you turn round, catching them unexpectedly, and they’re just weak, nervous people trying to get by with each other. (Hanif Kureishi, from The Buddha of Suburbia)
What I bought – 7 April 2010
“Today’s lesson is, if someone puts poison in your tea, don’t drink it.” (Christopher Moore, from Lamb)
What I bought – 3 March 2010
I looked through the Gideon Bible in my motel room for tales of great destruction. ‘The sun was risen upon the Earth when Lot entered into Zo-ar,’ I read. ‘Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.’
So it goes.
Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them.
And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. (Kurt Vonnegut, from Slaughterhouse-5)
What I bought – 10 February 2010
“Reading,” he says, “is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead …”
“Or that is not present because it does not yet exist, something desired, feared, possible or impossible,” Ludmilla says. “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be …” (There, now you see the Other Reader leaning forward to peer beyond the edge of the printed page at the ships of the rescuers or the invaders appearing on the horizon, the storms …) “The book I would like to read now is a novel in which you sense the story arriving like still-vague thunder, the historical story along with the individual’s story, a novel that gives the sense of living through an upheavel that still has no name, has not yet taken shape …” (Italo Calvino, from If on a winter’s night a traveller)
What I bought – 6 January 2010
You don’t know exactly when you fall in love with someone, do you? There isn’t that sudden moment when the music stops and you look into one another’s eyes for the first time, or whatever. Well, maybe it’s like that for some people, but not me. I had a friend who told me she fell for a boy when she woke up in the morning and realized he didn’t snore. It doesn’t sound much, does it? Except it sounds true. (Julian Barnes, from Talking It Over)
What I bought – 3 December 2009
They tax our policy, and call it cowardice,
Count wisdom as no member of the war.
Forestall prescience, and esteem no act
But that of hand. The still and mental parts,
That do contrive how many hands shall strike
When fitness calls them on, and know by measure
Of their observant toil the enemies’ weight –
Why, this hath not a finger’s dignity.
What I bought – 11 November 2009
“I love my dead gay son!”
The Anchor #2 (“Five Furies Part Two: Bark and Hide, Bone and Root”) by Phil Hester (writer), Brian Churilla (artist), Matthew Wilson (colorist), and Johnny Lowe (letterer). $3.99, 22 pgs, FC, Boom! Studios.
What I bought – 7 October 2009
“I’m not a hero! I’m not a savior! Forget what you know!”
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What I bought -12 August 2009
You know, this world is full of people who look a lot like Gavin McLeod!
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