Commonplace Book 02.26.20

Commonplace Book 02.26.20

Alice Munro, “Miles City, Montana”:

“In my own house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide—sometimes from the children but more often from the jobs to be done and the phone ringing and the sociability of the neighborhood. I wanted to hide so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself.”

Madame de Staël, On Germany:

“Nothing is less applicable to the conduct of life than a mathematical reasoning: a proposition in figures is decidedly either false or true; in all other relations the true mixes itself with the false in such a manner that often instinct alone can make us decide between different motives which are sometimes equally powerful on either side.”

Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant, User-Friendly:

“Call it the user-friendly paradox: As gadgets get easier to use, they become more mysterious; they make us more capable of doing what we want, while also making us more feeble in deciding whether what we seem to want is actually worth doing.”

Samantha Harvey, The Western Wind: A Novel:

“His posture eased, his lips moved to the faintest of smiles, and someone pleasant appeared in his expression, the boy his mother must have once loved. I wondered what had softened him. . . . How unknowable men are, full of corners.”

Edith Templeton, The Surprise of Cremona:

“He who does not take the time to conquer the artichoke by stages does not deserve to penetrate to its heart. There are no shortcuts in life to anything: least of all to the artichoke.”

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