Papéis e Letras

"And so, does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take? I declare that no accomplishment has substance nearly as great as the road used to achieve it. We are not creatures of destinations. It is the journey that shapes us. Our callused feet, our backs strong from carrying the weight of our travels, our eyes open with the fresh delight of experiences lived. In the end, I must proclaim that no good can be achieved by false means. For the substance of our existence is not in the achievement, but in the method."

10. "Horas, horas sem fim,
 pesadas, fundas,
esperarei por ti
até que todas as coisas sejam mudas.
Até que uma pedra irrompa
e floresça.
Até que um pássaro me saia da garganta


(O Top Ten Tuesday é uma rubrica da autoria do blog The Broke and the Bookish)

"Por vezes, imerso nos seus livros, tomava consciência de tudo o que não sabia, que não lera, e a serenidade à qual aspirava estilhaçava-se, quando percebia o pouco tempo de que dispunha na vida para ler tanta coisa, para aprender o que queria."

                                                                                                          Stoner, de John Williams

Tão eu quando leio ou ouço os meus professores falar...

"Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. [...]"

"There were a few compensations to having corporeal aspect. Food (jam tarts were my favourites); drink (mostly wine and mead); setting things on fire; sex (although I was still extremely confused by all the taboos surrounding this - no animals, no siblings, no men, no married women, no demons - frankly, it was amazing to me that anyone had sex at all, with so many rules against it). There was also sleep, which I enjoyed; and flying above the battlements in hawk Aspect (and occasionally shedding a well-aimed load onto Heimdall's golden armour as he stood watch on Bifrost)."

  - The Gospel of Loki, Joanne Harris

"She looked at Peter Walsh; her look, passing through all that time and emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully, and rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and rises and flutters away. Quite simply she wiped her eyes." 

                                                                               Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf 

"If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams."

“It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you.”

Aqui fica uma frase de Ralph Waldo Emerson, escritor norte-americano do século XIX, citada no livro que estou a ler, A History of Reading:

"All these books are the majestic expression of the universal conscience, and are more to our daily purpose than this year's almanac or this day's newspaper. But they are for the closet, and are to be read on the bended knee. Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue, but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart."

"After four years in Geneva, Sabina settled in Paris, but she could not escape her melancholy. If someone had asked her what had come over her, she would have been hard pressed to find words for it.
When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina - what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden, but the unbearable lightness of being."

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera