Book Excerpt Collection: October 2024

Book Excerpts:

“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.”

 - Thomas Paine, Common Sense

"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow."

- A.E. Houseman, Loveliest of Trees

“I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed.”

- David Benioff, City of Thieves

“I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”

- Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

“We believe that we can change the things around us in accordance with our desires—we believe it because otherwise we can see no favourable outcome. We do not think of the outcome which generally comes to pass and is also favourable: we do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.” 

- Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” 

– Frank Herbert, Dune

"No one tells you it's all about to change, to be taken away. There's no proximity alert, no indication that you're standing on the precipice. And maybe that's what makes tragedy so tragic. Not just what happens, but how it happens: a sucker punch that comes at you out of nowhere, when you're least expecting it. No time to flinch or brace."

- Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”

- John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

- Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn’t nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

In his Memoirs, Ludwig von Mises describes the Nazi control and the reflections of his wife, Margit: “The terror of the past few weeks still lingers in my mind. Though nothing really happend to us, I was conscious of the dangers around us. Our freedom was at stake; I could not do what I wanted to do. There were spies everywhere, spies who watched you, misinterpreted the simplest of your actions, and reported you. Household employees who had grown old with families they lived with, suddenly became enemies. Children were taught to observe their parents and report on them. The Germans had organized everything so thoroughly beforehand that it took only a few days for freedom to turn into tyranny.”

- Ludwig von Mises, Memoirs (1940)

Margit, in her memoirs, described their last days in Vienna: “Students climbed the wall and watch the Jews clean the street and when a German soldier passed by, the Jews had to step into the gutter accompanied with roaring laughter of the crowd …. In St. Steven Church, a high picture of Hitler was raised … On March 14th, Hitler moved into Vienna, the city where he had lived as a pauper. That night he made his first speech on radio. His voice still reigns in my ears. It was rough, throaty, and vulgar, but he had a strong hypnotic power of persuasion.”

- Margit von Mises, My Years with Ludwig von Mises

Milton Friedman’s Pencil Example:

Like Adam Smith Pin Factory example, Milton Friedman uses his pencil lesson to explain why the operation of the free market is so essential, not only to promote productive efficiency, but, even more, to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.

“There is not a single person in the world who could make a pencil. The wood from which pencil is made comes from a tree that was cut down somewhere. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make the steel, it took iron ore. Graphite, compressed graphite comes from mines in South America. Rubber comes from Malaya (Malaysia), where the rubber tree isn't even native. It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government."

- Milton Friedman, Pencil

“In a country where youth is adored, we lost ours before we were out of our twenties. We learned to accept death there, and it erased our sense of immortality. We met our human frailties, the dark side of ourselves, face-to-face … The war destroyed our faith, betrayed our trust, and dropped us outside. It was remarkable how quickly a turbulent world could calm. In early 1974, with the war over, the country seemed to release a great exhalation of relief. The fight for rights went on, of course: Civil rights and women’s rights were a constant battle and the Stonewall riots had put gay rights in the news, too. Equality was the goal, but no longer in that hold-a-sign-and-march kind of way. The Vietnam veterans disappeared into the landscape, hiding in plain sight among a populace that either held them in contempt or considered them not at all. The hippies changed, too; they graduated from college and left their communes and cut their hair and began to look for jobs. Even the music changed. Gone was the angry protest music of the war. Now everyone sang along to John Denver and Linda Ronstadt and Elton John. The Beatles had broken up. Janis and Jimi were dead.”

Kristin Hannah, The Women https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-women/id6448934772

"He went on speaking of God’s kingdom much like Judas did—as a government free of Rome with a Jewish king and righteous rule, but also as a great feast of compassion and justice. At our last meeting I’d called him a stonemason, a carpenter, a yarn sorter, and a fisherman. I saw now he was, 'truth, a sage, and perhaps like Judas, an agitator.' But even that didn’t fully explain him. I knew of no one who put compassion above holiness. Our religion might preach love, but it was based on purity. God was holy and pure; therefore, we must be holy and pure. But here was a poor mamzer saying God is love; therefore, we must be love. I said, 'You speak as if God’s kingdom is not just a place on earth, but a place inside us.' 'So, I believe.' Then does God live in the Temple in Jerusalem or in this kingdom inside us?

“Having grown chilled in the shade, I went to sit on a rock in the sun, thinking of the endless debates I’d held in my head about God. I’d been taught God was a figure similar to humans, only vastly more powerful, which failed to comfort me because people could be so utterly disappointing. It reassured me suddenly to think of God not as a person like ourselves, but as an essence that lived everywhere. God could be love, as Jesus believed. For me, he would be I Am Who I Am, the beingness in our midst.”

The Book of Longings, Sue Monk Kidd, p.124 https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-book-of-longings/id1482555568