Innocence: I am only stepping on your face because it lies in my path.
E. B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.
I woke up thinking a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens.
I would like to visit the factory that makes train horns, and ask them how they are able to arrive at that chord of eternal mournfulness. Is it deliberately sad? Are the horns saying, Be careful, stay away from this train or it will run you over and then people will grieve, and their grief will be as the inconsolable wail of this horn through the night? The out-of-tuneness of the triad is part of its beauty.
As soon as you start doing that - changing things - it seems self-evident to me that you've entered the world of make-believe. If you pretend that it's true, and use your own name, you are misleading people. Fiction is looser and wilder and sometimes in the end more self-revealing, anyway.
Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.
I found my mind has changed over the last years. Different vulnerabilities - things that I was never vulnerable to before I am now. And vice-versa. Things I was vulnerable to then are like water off a duck's back. I have a lot less fear. I think I'm getting more determined.
Linden just wants to protect her, is what I want to say. She's all he has. I left him. I'm at arms reach, but I've left him.
It is not as in the Bible, that God created man in his own image. But, on the contrary, man created God in his own image.
The frontier between public and private shifts from time to time and culture to culture.