I feel like quoting people today …
“He is a writer. I think P and I fell into our own semantic trap, and romanticized him. Writers are fine, sensitive beings, aware of the world, the inner tensions, alert, inquiring, and thoroughly superior beings. Well. He doesn’t even read the newspaper. He is not at all worried about McCarthy, saying the average man is more interested in his own work and his family than in what McCarthy does.” — An excerpt from Julia Child’s letters.
“I’d been thinking about that word, Kunhar, how kun sounded like kus which sounded like a cross between cunt and kiss. I held the bitter taste of glacier melt in my mouth as the moon eased deep into the river’s skin and she scattered him in pieces.” — The Walrus gives us a bit of the Granta on Pakistan, this piece from Uzma Aslam Khan.
“If “what Orwell feared were those who would ban books,” Neil Postman argues, what “Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”” — At Maud Newton’s Tumblr.
“Reading requires an act of empathy, really. What you’re doing when you’re reading a book is saying, I’m going to turn off who I am for a little bit, and I’m going to enter the personality of another human being. Reading is a very generous act, but it’s a very helpful act if you really want to understand what another person is like” — Gary Shteyngart (via)
