reviews
-
“Alchemy, after all, is altogether a safer and more predictable art than life. Alchemy involves no physical journeys, no interaction with living human beings. The alchemist suffers heartbreak and disappointment, but not often betrayal.“ “The Alchemist’s Daughter” by Katharine McMahon These days, it seems everyone’s daughter has a book written about them, but I decided…
-
“‘It was his idea of cosmic dissonance. The idea that the two realities would be inimical to each other, setting up a dissonance that would move toward resolution. That one reality would gather strength and the other diminish until the weaker one died out. Toward the end of his life he came to believe that…
-
” ‘It’s crazy how we always think we have time to tell people we know just how we feel, and then they can be gone in a heartbeat and we missed our chance.’ “ “Mommy, May I?” by A.K. Alexander We’ve all heard of Chekov’s gun, yeah? If there’s a gun in the first act,…
-
“‘…The only equal weapon I’ll ever have is my wits. But without knowing things, my wits are like a bow with no arrows. Don’t leave me disarmed.’” “The Sharing Knife Book 3.: Passage” by Lois McMaster Bujold Of the books in Lois McMaster Bujold’s The Sharing Knife series, the third book Passage is so far…
-
“Marcel woke the next morning in a forest shrouded in the silver robes of a fine mist. Others might have said it was beautiful the way the wisps of fog clung to the trees. Their eyes might have picked out the moss and lichen that spotted the beech trees so delicately and the thick mats…
-
“What I have taught and laid down, Ananda, as Doctrine (Dhamma) and Discipline (Vinaya), this will be your teacher when I am gone.” “What the Buddha Taught” by Walpola Rahula My first introduction to Buddhism was at college, where I decided to take it as one of my Philosophy & Religion credits and had no…
-
“The experience left her with a certain haunted quality I very much admired. She’d looked into the face of something horrible, and I wanted to know what that felt like.” “Naked” by David Sedaris There are plenty of really stellar and poignant quotes from David Sedaris’s collection of episodic memoirs, Naked, that I like much…
-
“In a flash, only thirty years, the Mongol warriors would defeat every army, capture every fort, and bring down the walls of every city they encountered. Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus would soon kneel before the dusty boots of illiterate young Mongol horsemen.” “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World” by Jack Weatherford…
-
“…it might not then be too fanciful to say that some houses are born bad.” “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson When it comes time to return to working on Rosewood Manor, I know exactly what book will be coming off the shelves to reread to help inspire that great, brooding, heavy feeling…
L.S. Engler 