Recent clippings

Last Christmas Jeff got me a Kindle. I had serious doubts about how this was going to fit into my life. It's not that I don't like technology - I do. But for some reason I was skeptical, just like I was skeptical when he got me my iPod touch a few years ago. Which was just like when I was skeptical when my parents got me my iPod Mini back in 2005. Of course, I didn't really know what an iPod was when I got my first one, so that had something to do with it.

Of course I always end up loving the new device once I get used to it.

I love books - hard copy books, their feel, different type faces, seeing them lined up on the shelves. I wasn't sure about ebooks, they just aren't the same. But then I discovered the library kindle lending system (I'm a library girl all the way) and my Kindle became my new best metro-riding buddy.

I adore my Kindle's highlighting feature and like looking back through "My Clippings."

So here are some of my clippings from this summer:

"Hindsight's a wonderful thing," Klara said. "If we all had it there would be no history to write about."
-Life After Life: A Novel (Kate Atkinson)

"--if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don't think, 'oh I love this picture because it's universal.' 'I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.' That's not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It's a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you. ... --it'll never strike anbody the same way and the great majority of people it'll never strike in any deep way at all but--a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular. Yours, yours. I was painted for you."
-The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) (Donna Tart)

"There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on. I am living that time with my husband now. I try to study our happiness so that I will be able to remember it in the future, just in case something happens and we find ourselves in need. These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years, so that when love calls out, "How far would you go for me?" you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, "Farther than you would ever have thought was possible."
-This is the Story of a Happy Marriage (Ann Patchett)

"Except now I wanted the jolts and jogs of ordinary life. I wanted my consonants interrupting my vowels as I spoke, my feet stubbing hers as we hugged, my nose bumping hers as we kissed. I wanted realness, even if it was flawed and pockmarked."
-The Beginner's Goodbye (Anne Tyler)

"Eleanor was right: She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something."
 -Eleanor & Park (Rainbow Rowell)

"You'd get a great, private phonograph, and all of eternity to listen to your life's melody. You could isolate your one life out of the cacophonous galaxy--the a cappella version--or you could play it back with its accompaniment, embedded in the brass and strings of mothers, fathers, sisters, windfalls and failures, percussive cities of strangers. You could play it forward or backward, back and back, and listen to the future of your past. You could lift the needle at whim, defeating Time."
-Swamplandia! (Karen Russell)

"What do you think is going on?" "I feel too much. That's what's going on." "Do you think one can feel too much? Or just feel in the wrong ways?" "My insides don't match up with my out-sides." "Do anyone's insides and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and outside." "But it's worse for me." "I wonder if everyone thinks it's worse for him." "Probably. But it really is worse for me."
-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel (Jonathan Safran Foer)

"Sometimes, after an especially trying day, she felt an urge to burn everything she had worn."
-Breathing Lessons: A Novel (Anne Tyler)