Remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no ma...
A book by David K. Reynolds, who had, in the early 1980s, come up with a system he called Constructive Living, a Western combination of two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on ge...
When I think back on all the refugee camps I visited, all over the world, the people always asked for the same thing: books. Sometimes even before medicine or shelter--they wanted books for their chil...
Universal health care was always an issue Mom cared about, and the more care she got, the angrier she became that good medicine wasn’t available for everyone in the United States. The pharmacy almost...
This, I finally realized, was how Mom was able to focus when I was not. It was how she was able to be present with me, present with the people at a benefit or the hospital. She felt whatever emotions...
Mom went on to tell me, as we sat there, that she really believed your personal life was personal. Secrets, she felt, rarely explained or excused anything in real life, or were even all that interesti...
It’s cruelty that gets to me. Still, it’s important to read about cruelty.Why is it important? Because when you read about it, it’s easier to recognize. That was always the hardest thing in the refuge...
I needed to remind myself that good news and bad news are often relative to your expectations, not anything absolute.
How can you be lonely, Mom said, when there are always people who want to share their stories with you, to tell you about their lives and families and dreams and plans?
Connectivity is one thing; connectivity is another. . . . Constant connectivity can be a curse, encouraging the lesser angels of our nature. None of the nine Muses of classical times bore the names I...
But it's one thing to feel that a book can speak beyond its particular time and place to something universal, and another to ignore the circumstances and time in or about which it was written.
And when people would say to Mom, I’ll include you in my prayers, it gave her great solace. It wasn’t a platitude for her—when she knew people were praying for her, it was something concrete and immen...
And a piece of advice that she thought was one of the most important things she wanted to pass on: You should tell your family every day that you love them. And make sure they know that you’re proud o...
Also, how could anyone who loves books not love a book that is itself so in love with books?
A phrase the doctor used had reassured Mom—treatable but not curable.
They would soon be old enough to read The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit and Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, and eventually Iris Murdoch and Alan Bennett. They could all be readers, and mayb...
Remarked to Mom how all the books we were reading then shared not just length but a certain theme: fate and the effects of the choices people make. I think most good books share that theme, Mom said.
Did manage to read some pages from a book that’s also about how people can find strength they didn’t know they had. What book was that? The Book of Common Prayer, Mom answered. Didion? No, Will. Mom’s...
Kokoro, a remarkable novel by Natsume Soseki,
I spend my life collecting books and sentences from them: I've sought alongside ones I've stumbled across, and sentences I've forced into my brain through rote memorization alongside ones that just fo...