Excerpts from Books Worth Buying

[great-book-recommendations]

All Americans are sometimes Republicans and sometimes Democrats, which is the great thing we forget about our country; that we are all Americans.

[great-book-recommendations]

Only a country as great as America could possibly survive the tumult of the last two years. Despite all our conflicting opinions, and all the external forces, the bad actors and machinery of other states who wish us ill, prevailed in peace. This is a country that, in times of slavery, at the height of its power,made an honest assessment of its actions, and deeming them immoral, tried to amend them. For all the things wrong in America — a miraculous few of great import are right.

[great-book-recommendations]

The Postman is a novel  from the point of view of the  mailman who delivers the mail to  Pablo Neruda. Neruda gives him advice on love and life.

[great-book-recommendations]

“Love that is cleansed by tears will remain eternally pure and beautiful”

Khalil Gibran Broken Wings

[great-book-recommendations]

“She was the one who first sang to me the poetry of real life”

    Khalil Gibran 

  The Broken Wings

[great-book-recommendations]

To Wash The Child

Only the most ancient love on earth will wash and comb the statue of the children, straighten the feet and knees. The water rises, the soap slithers, and the pure body comes up to breathe the air of flowers and motherhood. Oh, the sharp watchfulness, the sweet deception, the lukewarm struggle! Now the hair is a tangled pelt criscrossed by charcoal, by sawdust and oil, soot, wiring, crabs, until love, in its patience, sets up buckets and sponges, combs and towels, and, out of scrubbing and combing, amber, primal scrupulousness, jasmines, has emerged the child, newer still, running from the mother's arms to clamber again on its cyclone, go looking for mud, oil, urine and ink, hurt itself, roll about on the stones. Thurs, newly washed, the child springs into life, for later, it will have time for nothing more than keeping clean, but with the life lacking.

[great-book-recommendations]

[wisdom-and-such]

Uji; by Zen Master Dogen, excerpt from Shobogenzo

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“I hope that after reading the following pages the leaders of the Y. M. C. A. will start a campaign to induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.”  - Bertrand Russell

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[wisdom-and-such]

excerpt from Letters To A Young Poet, a mail correspondence between a wannabe poet and Rainer Maria Rilke  that was later published

[wisdom-and-such]

[great-book-recommendations]

From: ‘The Secret Oral Teachings In Tibetan Buddhist Sects’

[great-book-recommendations]

Uji --essay by Zen Master Dogen