I've been in something of a reading slump lately. It has had less to do with the books I've been reading than with the mood I've been in. Lately, I just haven't felt like immersing myself in a book. I haven't stopped reading all together. I just haven't been reading as much as I did last year. As a result, I've fallen well off my book-a-week pace, which is bothering me to no end. Instead of writing a synopsis of each book, I thought I would share a favorite quote (or two) from each.
"And in that place (ed. Capitol Hill), I think about America and those who built it. This nation's founders, who somehow rose above petty ambitions and narrow calculations to imagine a nation unfurling across a continent. And those like Lincoln and King, who ultimately laid down their lives in the service of perfecting an imperfect union. And all the faceless, nameless men and women, slaves and soldiers and tailors and butchers, constructing lives for themselves and their children and grandchildren, brick by brick, rail by rail, calloused hand by calloused hand, to fill in the landscape of our collective dreams."
"It is that process I wish to be a part of."
"My heart is filled with love for this country." p. 362, The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
"Humanism has to speak in the terms of extant human beings. The terms of today's human beings are air conditioners and suburbs and water impoundments overlaying whole countrysides, and the hell with nature except maybe in a cross-sectional park here and there. In our time quietness and sun and leaves and bird song and all the multitudinous lore of the natural world have to come second or third, because whether we wanted to be born there or not, we were all born into the prickly machine-humming place that man has hung for himself above that natural world." - p. 159
"You could go on forever. You know it. Your muscles have gone supple-hard and your hands as crusty as dry rawhide, and your head has cleared, an your boat goes precisely, unstrenuously where and how you want it to go, and all your gear falls into its daily use with thoughtless ease. There is merely not enough river, not enough time... You don't miss anyone on God's earth's face. You're no more bored with the sameness of your days and your diet and your tasks than a chickadee is bored, or the passenger on the sunny bow, or a catfish; each day has its fullness, bracketed by sleep. In the evenings by the fire and in the clear mornings are when you have it strongest - the balance, the rightness, the knowledge." - p. 292, from Goodbye to a River by John Graves (a book I discovered via Adventure Journalist).
"It is pretty generally admitted, both in the Drones Club and elsewhere, that Bertram Wooster in his dealings with the opposite sex invariably shows himself a man of the nicest chivalry - what you sometimes hear described as a parfait gentil knight. It is true that at the age of six, when the blood ran hot, I once gave my nurse a juicy one over the top knot with a porringer, but the lapse was merely a temporary one. Since then, though few men have been more sorely tried by the sex, I have never raised a hand against a woman. And I can give no better indication of my emotions at this moment than by saying that, preux chevalier though I am, I came within the veriest toucher of hauling off and letting a revered aunt have it on the side of the head with a papier mache elephant - the only object on the mantelpiece which the fierce rush of life at Totleigh Towers had left still unbroken." - pp. 239-240, The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse.
