But mostly, when I look back, what I remember is not Mom rushing about; it’s Mom sitting quietly in the center of the house, in the living room, under the swirling colors of a Paul Jenkins painting; t...
Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time, one could g...
You don't need a reason to do what you do for love.
What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation? It helped you remember that people aren’t here for you; everyone is here for one another.
Mom’s reaction to this chaos isn’t a surprise. No matter how high the bill that she is paying or that Medicare is paying for her, she will say to me or herself: What happens to all the people who can’...
Lin Yutang also believed that reading is an art. One chapter of the Importance of Living is devoted to the Art of Reading. Lin writes that, the man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in hi...
If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop; you went via Mom, who directed the traffic flow and determined the priorities: which family memb...
I was thinking a lot about loneliness, because we were now reading Kokoro, a remarkable novel by Natsume Soseki, which was published in 1914 and was one of fourteen novels Soseki wrote after retiring...
I think it's because it shows that people--or hobbits, as the case may be--can find strength they didn't know they had.
And I’m also talking about kindness, not just about being nice. You can be gruff or abrupt and still be kind. Kindness has much more to do with what you do than how you do it.
Was just that she felt you were missing the main point—you were focused on one thing when you should have been focused on another.
Not. Both Mom and I had read it when it came out in 1999 and had recommended it to each other simultaneously. In
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch,
That’s the point, Will. You can’t control the beatings. But maybe you can have some control over your happiness.
Mom agreed but pointed out that she’d been doing the same with others too—talking about books with my sister and brother and some of her friends. I guess we’re all in it together, she said. And I coul...
Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas, a young writer originally from Boston who was now living and teaching in New York. Man Gone Down is another big, ambitious novel—about race, the American Dream, father...
MOM LIKED THE Ritalin. And she found it had a terrific and unexpected side effect—it helped her read. The day she first tried it, she was tired and uncomfortable and having trouble concentrating. She...
I do believe that my Holy Grail of books could be out there—and I intend to keep reading until I find it. Of course, I'll keep reading after I do, too, because—well, because I love to read. I also bel...
For this day only is ours, we are dead to yesterday, and we are not yet born to the morrow.
The Painted Veil