A Quote by Michael Dirda
I have now and again tried to imagine the perfect environment, the ideal conditions for reading: A worn leather armchair on a rainy night? A hammock in a freshly mown backyard? A verandah overlooking the summer sea? Good choices, every one. But I have no doubt that they are all merely displacements, sentimental attempts to replicate the warmth and snugness of my mother's lap.
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Reading is a joy for my kids, and to swing in a hammock on a lazy summer day reading a good book just goes with summer.
The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
Every person on the face of the earth makes mistakes, Lily. Every last one. We're all so human. Your mother made a terrible mistake, but she tried to fix it.' 'Good night,' I said, and rolled onto my side. 'There is nothing perfect,' August said from the doorway. 'There is only life.
Of course we can always imagine more perfect conditions, how it should be ideally, how everyone should behave. But it is not our task to create an ideal. It's our task to see how it is, and to learn from the world as it is. For the awakening of the heart, conditions are always good enough.
I now let go of worn out things, worn out conditions, and worn out relationships. Divine order is now established and maintained in me and in my world.
Most of the avoidable suffering in life springs from our attempts to escape the unavoidable suffering inherent in the fragmentary nature of our present existence. We expect immortal satisfactions from mortal conditions, and lasting and perfect happiness in the midst of universal change. To encourage this expectation, to persuade mankind that the ideal is realizable in this world, after a few preliminary changes in external conditions, is the distinguishing mark of all charlatans, whether in thought or action.
My room was in one of those turrets and at night I could hear the sea and the faint rustle of eelgrass in the soft wind. The weather was perfect that summer. No storms. Blue skies and just the right amount of wind every day. The sailors were in heaven.
Any rainy summer morning, of course, has the seeds of gloomy alienation sown in. But a rainy summer morning far from home - when your personal clouds don't move but hang - can easily produce the feeling of the world as seen from the grave. This I know.
My perfect day is constantly changing. Right now, it would be to lie around in a hammock reading with a portable phone and a table of food next to it. I would spend all day there. And that's all that I can possibly come up with on the spur of the moment.
You must watch the pictures that you paint with your imagination. Your environment and the conditions of your life at any given time are the direct result of your own inner expectations. If you imagine dire circumstances, ill health or desperate loneliness, these will be 'automatically' materialized, for these thoughts themselves bring about the conditions that will give them a reality in physical terms. If you would have good health then you must imagine this as vividly as you fearfully imagine ill health.
My Helmut Lang leather pants are my most treasured possession - I've worn them almost every day for two years, and they look good with everything.
If you are living for an ideal and driving yourself as hard as you can to be perfect - at your job or as a mother or as a perfect wife - you lose the natural, slow rythmn of life. There's a rushing, trying to attain the ideal; the slower pace of the beat of the earth, the state where you simply are, is forgotten
When you become a mother, it's your mission in life to protect your child. I therefore can't imagine what a hell it must be crossing the sea with a crying child on your lap without any certainty of making it to the other side alive.
The library was a little old shaby place. Francie thought it was beautiful. The feeling she had about it was as good as the feeling she had about church. She pushed open the door and went in. She liked the cmbined smell of worn leather bindings, library past and freshly inked stamping pads better than she liked the smell of burning incense at high mass.
On the first day of May the people of the crofter townland are up betimes and busy as bees about to swarm. This is the day of migrating, bho baile gu beinn (from townland to moorland), from the winter homestead to the summer sheiling. The summer of their joy is come, the summer of the sheiling, the song, the pipe and the dance, when the people ascend the hill to the clustered bothies, overlooking the distant sea from among the fronded ferns and fragrant heather, where neighbour meets neighbour, and lover meets lover.
Tom Hanks was really great [the 'Burbs']. The director, Joe Dante, was wonderful. We filmed it here during the summer, every day at Universal. Even the food was good - I mean it was junk but it was really good. The whole thing was like some ideal summer-school experience. It may not have been the best movie ever, but it was certainly the most fun.
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