Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, r. May 2020

All America lies at the end of the wilderness road, and our past is not a dead past, but still lives in us. Our forefathers had civilization inside themselves, the wild outside. We live in the civilization they created, but within us the wilderness still lingers. What they dreamed, we live, and what they lived, we dream. -T.K. Whipple, Study Out the Land

p. 211 There was something different about her, Jake had to admit. She had a beautiful face, a beautiful body, but also a distance in her such as he had never met in a woman. Certain mountains were that way, like the Bighorns. The air around them was so clear you could ride toward them for days without seeming to get any closer. And yet, if you kept riding, you would get to the mountains. He was not so sure he would ever get to Lorie.

p. 473 Of course they had heard that the buffalo were being wiped out, but with the memory of the southern herd so vivid, they had hardly credited the news. Discussing it in Lonesome Dove they had decided that the reports must be exaggerated - thinned out, maybe, but not wiped out. Thus the sight of the road of bones stretching over the prairie was a shock. Maybe roads of bones were all that was left. The thought gave the very emptiness of the plains a different feel. With those millions of animals gone, and the Indians mostly gone in their wake, the great plains were truly empty, unpeopled and ungrazed. Soon the whites would come, of course, but what he was seeing was a moment between, no the plains as they had been, or as they would be, but a moment of true emptiness, with thousands of miles of grass resting unused, occupied only by remnants - of the buffalo, the Indians, the hunters. Augustus thought they were crazed remnants, mostly, like the old mountain man who worked night and day gather bones to no purpose.

p. 474 A chain of follies had put him there: Call's abrupt decision to become a cattleman and his own decision, equally abrupt, to try and rescue a girl foolish enough to be taken in by Jake Spoon. None of it was sensible, yet he had to admit there was something about such follies that he liked. The sensible way, which he had pursued once or twice in his life, had always proved boring, usually within a few days. In his case it had led to nothing much, just excessive drunkenness and reckless card playing. There was more enterprise in certain follies, it seemed to him.

p. 587 It had always puzzled [July] how some men could spend their days just sitting in a saloon, drinking, but now it was beginning to seem less puzzling. It was restful, and the heavy feeling that came with the drinking was a relief to him, in a way. For the last few weeks he had been struggling to do things which were beyond his powers - he knew he was supposed to keep trying, even if he wasn't succeeding, but it was pleasant not to try for a little while. 

p. 622 "People have been living there since the beginning, and their bones have kinda filled up the ground. It's interesting to think about, all the bones in the ground. But it's just fellow creatures, nothing to shy from." It was such a startling thought - that under him, beneath the long grass, were millions of bones - that Newt stopped feeling so strained. He rode beside Mr. Gus, thinking about it, the rest of the night.

p. 696 "You can't avoid it, you've got to learn to handle it," Augustus said. "If you only come face to face with your own mistakes once or twice in your life it's bound to be extra painful. I face mine every day - that way they ain't usually much worse than a dry shave."

p. 832 "I can't think of nothing better than riding a fine horse into new country. It's exactly what I was meant for, and Woodrow too." "Do you think we'll see Indians?" Newt asked. "You bet," Augustus said. "We might all get killed this afternoon, for all I know. That's the wild for you - it's got its dangers, which is part of the beauty. 'Course the Indians have had this land forever. To them it's precious because it's old. To us it's exciting because it's new."

p. 907 Often [Clara] sat out on her upper porch at night, wrapped in Bob's huge coat. She liked the bitter cold, a cold that seemed to dim the stars. 

The Great Unknown by Marcus du Sautoy, r. Apr. 2020

p. 21 "The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. It's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing." - Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

p. 56 At least with the future we can wait and see what the outcome of chaotic equations produces. But trying to work backward and understand what state our planet was in to produce the present is equally if not more challenging. The past, even more than the future, is probably something we can never truly know.

p. 75 "Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world." - Arthur Schopenhauer

p. 172 The problem, [Herbert McCabe] believed, is that religion far too often commits idolatry by trying to engage too personally with this concept of God. The trouble is that an undefined, unknowable, transcendent concept is too abstract for many to engage with. It can't offer the sort of consolation that many seek. So perhaps it is inevitable that God's potency depends on becoming a little less transcendent, and more tangible.

p. 229 "The universe is not constructed for our convenience. It's not an exercise in the philosophy of science. It's too bad if we can't find these things out. In fact, I'd be very suspicious if all these fundamental questions happened to be answerable by what we're doing.

p. 318 Consciousness allows the brain to take part in mental time travel. You can think of yourself in the past and even project yourself into the future. But at the same time, being aware of your own existence means having to confront the inevitability of your demise. Death-awareness is the price we pay for self-awareness. That is why Gallup believes that later in life chimpanzees prefer to lose their ability to be conscious of themselves. Could dementia in humans play a similar role, protecting aging humans from the painful recognition of their impending death?

p. 331 Many neuroscientists now speak of consciousness as being similar to the wetness of water. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon in the sense that it is a higher-level property of a system triggered by neuronal activity happening at a lower level. But that doesn't really explain what this higher-level thing really is.

p. 333 "What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind." - The Dhammapada

p. 417 I wonder, though, whether, as I come to the end of my exploration, I have changed my mind about declaring myself an atheist. With my definition of a God as that which we cannot know, to declare myself an atheist would mean that I believe there is nothing we cannot know. I don't believe that anymore. In some sense I think I have proved that this God does exist. The challenge now is to explore what quality this God has. My statement about being an atheist is really just a response to the rather impoverished version of God offered by most religions and cultures. I reject the existence of a supernatural intelligence that intervenes in the evolution of the universe and in our lives. This is a rejection of the God that people assign strange properties to - such as compassion, wisdom, love - that make no sense when it comes to the idea that I am exploring.

p. 426 Studies into consciousness suggest boundaries beyond which we cannot go. Our internal worlds are potentially unknowable to others. But isn't that one of the reasons we write and read novels? It is the most effective way to give others access to that internal world.-

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, r. April 2020

p. 4 In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.

p. 50 Opposite the hotel was a barren little park, as wretched as only the park of a dirty little town can be, but for Tereza it had always been an island of beauty: it had grass, four poplars, benches, a weeping willow, and a few forsythia bushes.

p. 55 The difference between the university graduate and the autodidact lies not so much in the extent of knowledge as in the extent of vitality and self-confidence.

p. 59 Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.

p. 59 Anyone whose goal is "something higher" must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why do we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.

p. 88 While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

p. 103 "When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities."

p. 110 The mass was beautiful because it appeared to her in a sudden, mysterious revelation as a world betrayed. From that time on she had known that beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere. Beauty hides behind the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenery.

p. 156 Toilets in modern water closets rise up from the floor like white water lilies. The architect does all he can to make the body forget how paltry it is, and to make man ignore what happens to his intestinal wastes after the water from the tank flushes them down the drain. Even though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and parliaments.

p. 170 She went outside and set off in the direction of the embankment. She wanted to see the Vltava. She wanted to stand on its banks and look long and hard into its waters, because the sight of the flow was soothing and healing. The river flowed from century to century, and human affairs play themselves out on its banks. Play themselves out to be forgotten the next day, while the river flows on.

p. 221 As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? ... The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them.

p. 246 Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil. Since God gave man freedom, we can, if need be, accept the idea that He is not responsible for man's crimes. The responsibility for shit, however, rests entirely with Him, the Creator of man.

p. 257 ... political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch.... The dictatorship of the proletariat or democracy? Rejection of the consumer society or demands for increased productivity? The guillotine or an end to the death penalty? It is all beside the point. What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

p. 278 And so on and so forth. Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

p. 289 We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

p. 298 And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote, r. Apr. 2020

I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighborhoods. For instance, there is a brownstone in the East Seventies where, during the early years of the war, I had my first New York apartment. It was one room crowded with attic furniture, a sofa and fat chairs upholstered in that itchy, particular red velvet that one associates with hot days on a tram. The walls were stucco, and a color rather like tobacco-spit. Everywhere, in the bathroom too, there were prints of Roman ruins freckled brown with age. The single window looked out on a fire escape. Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.

"Hold on," he said, gripping my wrist. "Sure I loved her. But it wasn't that I wanted to touch her." And he added, without smiling: "Not that I don't think about that side of things. Even at my age, and I'll be sixty-seven January ten. It's a peculiar fact -- but, the older I grow, that side of things seems to be on my mind more and more. I don't remember thinking about it so much even when I was a youngster and it's every other minute. Maybe the older you grow and the less easy it is to put thought into action, maybe that's why it gets all locked up in your head and becomes a burden. Whenever I read in the paper about an old man disgracing himself, I know it's because of this burden.

"I'll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead."

That Monday in October, 1943. A beautiful day with the buoyancy of a bird. To start, we had Manhattans at Joe Bell's; and, when he heard of my good luck, champagne cocktails on the house. Later, we wandered toward Fifth Avenue, where there was a parade. The flags in the wind, the thump of military bands and military feet, seemed to have nothing to do with war, but to be, rather, a fanfare arranged in my personal honor.

She was forever on her way out, not always with Rusty Trawler, but usually, and usually, too, they were joined by Mag Wildwood and the handsome Brazilian, whose name was José Ybarra-Jaegar: his mother was German. As a quartet, they struck an unmusical note, primarily the fault of Ybarra-Jaegar, who seemed as out of place in their company as a violin in a jazz band. He was intelligent, he was presentable, he appeared to have a serious link with his work, which was obscurely governmental, vaguely important, and took him to Washington several days a week. How, then, could he survive night after night in La Rue, El Morocco, listening to the Wildwood ch-ch-chatter and staring into Rusty's raw baby-buttocks face? Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character. That would explain much; Holly's determination explains the rest.

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell," Holly advised him. "That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full- grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky."

"I'm very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on forever. Not knowing what's yours until you've thrown it away."

A Sutil Arte de Ligar o Foda-se by Mark Manson, r. Mar. 2020

p. 11 Muitas vezes, o autoaprimoramento e o sucesso andam de mãos dadas. Não significa que sejam a mesma coisa.

p. 12 Afinal de contas, nenhuma pessoa realmente feliz sente necessidade de ficar falando que é feliz para si mesma no espelho. Ela simplesmente é.

p. 38 A vida é basicamente uma série interminável de problemas.... A solução de um problema é apenas o início do próximo.

p. 39 A felicidade está em resolver problemas. Repare que a palavra-chave é "resolver". Se você evita os problemas ou acha que não tem nenhum, está no caminho da infelicidade. Se acha que não consegue resolver seus problemas, estará no mesmo caminho. O segredo está em resolver os problemas, e não em não ter problemas. Para ser feliz, é preciso ter algo para resolver. Assim, a felicidade é uma forma de ação; é uma atividade, não algo que você recebe de forma passiva, que descobre magicamente...

p. 46 O que determina o sucesso não é "De que prazer você quer desfrutar?". A questão relavante é: "Qual dor você está disposto a suportar?" O caminho da felicidade é cheio de obstáculos e humilhações.

p. 127 Aproximar-se da verdade e da perfeição não leva à verdade nem à perfeição. Não devemos procurar a resposta "certa", e sim tentar eliminar nossos erros de hoje para estarmos um pouco menos errados amanhã.

p. 152 A verdade é que somos nossos piores observadores. Os últimos a perceber quando estamos irritados, enciumados ou tristes. A única maneira de descobrir isso é enfraquecer a nossa armadura de certeza, o tempo todo considerando a possibilidade de engano.

p. 173 Se seguirmos o princípio do Faça Alguma Coisa, o peso do fracasso é reduzido. Quando o parâmetro de sucesso é meramente a ação - quando todo resultado possível é considerado um progresso e tem seu valor, quando a inspiração é vista como uma recompensa e não um pré-requisito -, somos impulsionados à frente. Nos sentimos livres para fracassar, e até mesmo o fracasso nos movimenta.

p. 177 A liberdade nos dá a oportunidade de encontrar um significado maior, mas ela em si não tem necessariamente nada de significativo. No fim das contas, a única maneira de encontrar o significado e propósito é rejeitar alternativas, num processo que constitui um estreitamento da liberdade, ao escolher formar vínculos e assumir compromissos com um lugar, uma crença ou (ai!) uma pessoa.

p. 219 Você também vai morrer, mas só porque teve a sorte de viver. Pode não sentir isso agora, mas experimente ficar na beira de um penhasco algum dia e talvez consiga.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, r. Dec. 2019

p. 99 Anna read and understood, but it was unpleasant to read, that is to say, to follow the reflection of other people's lives. She was too eager to live herself.

p. 239 "You can't imagine what a pleasure this complete laziness is to me: not a thought in my brain - you might send a ball rolling through it!"

p. 241 Constantine Levin did not like talking or hearing about the beauty of nature. Words seemed to detract from the beauty of what he was looking at.

p. 261 Besides, painful as were for a mother the fear of illness, and sorrow at the appearance of evil tendencies in her children, those children were already beginning to repay her care by affording her small joys. These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but the gold.

p. 271 "Why does she talk French with the children?" he thought. "How unnatural and false it is! And the children feel it. Teach them French and deprive them of sincerity," thought he, not knowing that Dolly had considered the point over and over again and had decided that even to the detriment of their sincerity the children had to be taught French.

p. 308 One change Vronsky noticed in him was that quiet and permanent radiance which comes upon the faces of people who have succeeded and feel assured that everybody recognizes their success. Vronsky knew that kind of radiance, and noticed it at once on Serpukhovskoy's face.

p. 312 He had often before been joyfully conscious of his body, but had never loved himself, his own body, as he did now. It gave him pleasure to feel the slight pain in his strong leg, to be conscious of the muscles of his chest moving as he breathed.

p. 348 "I am working, I want to do something, and I had forgotten that it will all end in Death!" He sat on his bed in the dark, doubled his arms around his knees and thought, scarcely breathing from the mental strain. But the more mental effort he made the clearer he saw that it was undoubtedly so: that he had really forgotten and overlooked one little circumstance in life - that Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything, and there was no help for it. Yet, it was terrible, but true. "But I am still alive: what am I to do now? What am I to do?"

p. 394 "What is the use of arguing? No one ever convinces another." "Yes, you are quite right," said Levin, "for the most part, people argue so warmly only because they cannot make out what it is that their opponent wants to prove."

p. 395 He had experienced the fact that sometimes in the middle of a discussion one understands what it is that one's opponent likes, and suddenly likes it oneself, and immediately agrees with him, when all proofs become superfluous and unnecessary. Sometimes the reverse happens; one at last mentions the thing one likes, for the sake of which one has been devising arguments, and if this is said well and sincerely, one's opponent suddenly agrees and ceases to dispute. That was what he wanted to express.

p. 447 He thought she was prettier than ever: not that those flowers, the veil, or the dress ordered from Paris enhanced her beauty in any way, but because, despite all the carefully planned richness of her attire, the look on her sweet face and lips was still that look of innocent truthfulness.

p. 474 He could work neither when he was too indifferent nor when he was too highly roused and saw everything too distinctly. There was only one stage between calmness and inspiration, at which work was possible, and today he was too excited.

p. 484 "She takes no interest in our work, in the farm, in peasants, or in music, though she is quite good at that, or in books. She does nothing and is quite content." In his heart he blamed her, but he did not understand that she was preparing herself for a period of activity which was inevitably coming, when at one and the same time she would be her husband's wife, the mistress of the house, and a bearer, nurturer, and educator of her children. He did not understand that, but she knew it instinctively; and while getting ready for her gigantic task she did not reproach herself for the moments of careless and happy love that she now enjoyed while building her nest for the future.

p. 677 "You talk of moral training! You can't imagine how difficult that is! You have hardly mastered one fault when another crops up and there is a fresh struggle. One must have the support of religion - you remember our talk about that? ... No father relying on his own strength, without that support, could educate a child.

p. 731 Before any definite step can be taken in a household, there must be either complete division or loving accord between husband and wife. When their relations are indefinite it is impossible for them to make any move. Many families continue for years in their old ruts, hated by both husband and wife, merely because there is neither complete discord nor harmony. Both for Vronsky and for Anna life in Moscow... was intolerable.

p. 775 "I was so busy that I did not know when I could tear myself away. And you, as usual," said he, smiling, "are enjoying tranquil happiness outside the currents in your peaceful shallows."

p. 779 Since the moment when, at the sight of his beloved and dying brother, Levin for the first time looked at the questions of life and death in the light of the new convictions, as he called them, which between the ages of twenty and thirty-four had imperceptibly replaced the beliefs of his childhood and youth, he had been less horrified by death than by life without the least knowledge of whence it came, what it is for, why, and what it is. Organisms, their destruction, the indestructibility of matter, the law of the conservation of energy, development - the terms that had superseded these beliefs - were very useful for mental purposes; but they gave no guidance for life, and Levin suddenly felt like a person who has exchanged a thick fur coat for a muslin garment and who, being out in the frost for the first time, becomes clearly convinced, not by arguments, but with the whole of his being, that he is as good as naked and that he must inevitably perish miserably.

p. 789 "If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence - a reward, it is also not goodness. Therefore goodness is beyond the chain of cause and effect. It is exactly this I know and that we all know. What greater miracle could there be than that? Can I possibly have found the solution of everything? Have my sufferings really come to an end?"

Darker Than Night by Tom Henderson, r. Oct. 2019

p. 7 David wasn't an avid deer hunter, had never shot one, in fact. It wasn't one of the highlights of his year, as it is for many hunters. Most years he went, but it wasn't a religion for him. Truth of it was, sitting in a deer blind was more of a good, quiet way to get over his hangover from the night before than it was a place of stealth from which to kill deer. Brian wasn't much of a hunter, either, though he went every year, too, mostly to drink beer with the guys and play cards. His girlfriend, Janice Payne, would joke about him and David: "They seen a deer, they wouldn't shoot it, you know?" In fact, Brian wasn't a hunter at all. He might not admit it to the guys, but he told Janice he'd seen many a deer walking by over the years but had never even aimed at one, much less pulled a trigger. He just liked drinking with the guys at night and sitting out in the woods, at peace, during the day.