Showing posts with label Penguin RandomHouse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Penguin RandomHouse. Show all posts

 

"If love is resistant to reductionism, then what is that 'other nature' it seems to inhabit? Does that mean it exists independently of earthbound causality? Is it Shakespeare's 'uncaused cause/that alters not when it alteration finds'? Or is that just mysticism? Is it when you see a stranger across a crowded room and 'suddenly' you know? What is it you know?"

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In Defense of Love: An Argument by Ron Rosenbaum

 

"I started writing again. I write with urgency. If I don't write, I don't die. I don't waste away, and I don't even risk going hungry. I've got my little hotel. I lead a peaceful life. The best thing about old age is that we no longer feel the need to prove ourselves. I like walking on the beach in the early evening. I step into the tranquility of the waters and lie on my back, floating. I love it."

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A Practical Guide to Levitation by José Eduardo Agualusa

 

"It was only when he was alone and he couldn't participate in the business of living that he tended to notice how lovely being alive was."

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Tomorrrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

 


"Each galaxy contains billions and billions of stars, many of which will have planets round them. Our own galaxy blocks our view in certain directions, but apart from that the galaxies are distributed roughly uniformly throughout space, with some local concentrations and voids. The density of galaxies appears to drop off at very large distances, but that seems to be because they are so far away and faint that we can't make them out. As far as we can tell, the universe goes on in space for ever and is much the same no matter how far it goes on."

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Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking

 

"These types of connections are called 'consequential strangers,' a term coined by authors Melinda Blau and Karen Fingerman, who published a book by that title in 2009. A consequential stranger is someone who can't be categorized as a friend or even necessarily as a friendly acquaintance. They're just someone you're used to seeing in your life. Consequential strangers are co-workers, people at the dog park...there are far more consequential strangers in your life than intimate relationships, and in some cases, you'll see the supposedly unimportant people more often than your best friend." 

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The Lonely Hunter by Aimée Lutkin

"Like writing, sex work is a game of endurance. Whether in the club or on the street, scribbling in a journal or revising the last draft of a manuscript, the writer and the whore must learn to "stick it out" and be patient with the process."
 

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Modern Whore: A Memoir by Andrea Werhun and Nicole Bazuin

 


"There are stories that save us and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness, it can be very hard to know which is which."  



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Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv

 

"While he does so I wonder at Mrs. Abbott's life. From the horse and cart to the space and computer age. Two world wars, loss of empire, the disappearance of God, flower power, the shrinkage of the globe. What did she do during this long existence?"

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34 Patients by Dr. Tom Templeton

 

"'She'll get bored with Beaver soon enough.' 'The trouble is that he doesn't care for her in the least. If he did, it would soon be over...What an ass she is being.' 'I should say she is managing it unusually well, if you asked me.'"

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A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

 

"How to apply mouth tape, or 'sleep tape' as it's also called, is a matter of personal preference, and everyone I talked to had their own technique. Burhenne liked to place a small piece horizontally over the lips; Kearney preferred a fat strip over the entire mouth. The internet was filled with suggestions."

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Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor


"'Like clouds in the sky/So thoughts change their light shape in us/What we love today, tomorrow we despise.'"

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Novels, Tales, Journeys by Alexander Pushkin

 

"If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully."

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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

 

"Season one, episode one of Jersey Shore contains more action per second than either of the two world wars."

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Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer by Rax King

 

"But I just couldn't see him again. I know that sounds illogical. But it took so much energy and discipline to remind myself not to hope for my husband's love that I didn't think I had enough strength not to hope for David's love, either. It was too difficult for me. I would have to learn to forget or ignore my feelings for David, and I wasn't going to be able to do that if I kept seeing him. It was better to pretend I had never met him at all."

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To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara

 

"Time as a subject is actually not that well understood in physics. It's so engrained in our theories about how the universe works...we also know that time has a lot of strange properties, none more so than the fact that it doesn't flow at the same rate everywhere. In some places in the universe, time moves faster than in others...The history of scientific discovery reminds us to check our preconceptions because our limited experience isn't always universal...It's possible that time is not a basic permanent fixture, but a special condition, just like the flow of the river." 

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Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson

 

"My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose and then do something to permanently end our sorrow. We want to believe we can reach closure because grief can surprise and disorder us—even years after our loss."

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The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz

 

"The thought was disquieting—that our identities should be so mutable, and therefore the course of our lives."

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Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

 

"I'm beginning to think that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life: a pure, basic emotion to be respected, if not savoured. I would never dream of suggesting that we should wallow in misery or shrink from doing everything we to can alleviate it, but I do think it's instructive...If we don't allow ourselves the fundamental honesty of our own sadness, then we miss an important cue to adapt."

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Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May

 

"If the world were truly random and accidental, without any intrinsic purpose, agency or telos, then why were our physical laws fine-tuned with such precision? How did nature come to display what the physicist Paul Davies once called 'a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality?'"

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God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O'Gieblyn

 

"Dorothy was taking a shit at the library when her therapist called and she let it go to voicemail."

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The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood

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