Monday, October 31, 2016

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, r. Nov. 2016

p. 8 Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.

p. 16 ...nothing contributes so much to tranquillise the mind as a steady purpose, - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

p. 48 He heard with attention the little narration concerning my studies, and smiled at the names of Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus, but without the contempt that M. Krempe had exhibited. He said, that 'these were men to whose indefatigable zeal modern philosophers were indebted for most of the foundations of their knowledge. They had left to us, as an easier task, to give new names, and arrange in connected classifications, the facts which they in great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light. The labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.

p. 49 A man would make but a very sorry chemist if he attended to that department of human knowledge alone.

p. 53 Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.

p. 56 If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved; Caesar would have spared his country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.

p. 75 My country, my beloved country! who but a native can tell the delight I took in again beholding thy streams, thy mountains, and more than all, thy lovely lake!

p. 172 How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!

p. 195 Could I behold this, and live? Alas! life is obstinate, and clings closest where it is most hated.

Sunday, October 9, 2016

First You Have to Row a Little Boat by Richard Bode, r. Oct. 2016

p. 4 If the condition of fatherhood has taught me one thing, it is the difficulty, if not utter impossibility, of passing on to my offspring the lessons of my separate life.

p. 33 I come now, at this late juncture of my life, to this sudden realization: I have no destination, no real destination, in the literal sense. The destination, the place toward which my life is tending, is the journey itself and not the final stopping place. How I get there is more important than whether I arrive, although I will arrive, and what I must try to remember, now more than ever, is to listen to the wind, and the wind will tell me what to do.

p. 42 The day we invented the screw and the plow, we also invented the computer and the plane; it was only a matter of time, because it was sealed in the genes.

p. 79 From the time I was old enough to read, and possibly before, I had heard the music of language singing in my head. I was intrigued by the sound of words, by their cadence, and by the images they formed in the books I read, and so it was inevitable that, as soon as I learned how, I started to string sentences together so I could let others know what I thought and felt. That was my talent; it was no better or worse than the talent possessed by others, but it was distinctly my own.

p. 134 ...the consequences of indifference to the little wonders of the world are all too plain. Even now an epidemic depression, born of boredom, spreads across the land, and we turn to violence to fill the void. Instead of watching the spider weave its web, we watch slaughter in the living room, murder in the movie house. Hopelessly addicted before we know it, we find that make-believe killings aren't enough; they no longer satisfy the gnawing hunger in our bowels. We need mayhem, real war, real corpses to relieve the tedium that threatens to bury us alive.

p. 182 My son never sailed again; he had other things to do, other places to go, and he didn't have the same compulsion about a sloop in the wind that governed me. He went on to be an expert fisherman and a superb cabinetmaker, and for those endeavors he found his own masters, the ones who spoke to him. By then I had enough sense to give him my blessing and get out of his way.

p. 197 I am overwhelmed by the power of remembrance. I do not dwell in this precise and fleeting moment, but in the accumulation of all my moments for as far back as my human memory goes. I am my past, and to deny my past is to deny myself, because the life I lived right up to this ephemeral instant defines who I am. My life is not in me; it is on what I remember, and I do not possess what I remember so much as it possesses me.

p. 201 I think most of us are afraid that if we let ourselves feel our sorrow for the passing of the life that was, we will never regain our composure again. But the fear is misplaced; what should truly frighten us is the possibility that we might lose the power to recall the life we lived, which gives us our connection to ourselves. Our most terrifying diseases aren't the ones that take our life; they're the ones that cast us adrift on an empty sea by depriving us of our memories.