I participated in my library’s “Blind Date with a Book” program again this year to resounding success! I checked out two books based on their descriptions and ended up loving them both! The first one was all fluff with a little bit of magical realism, books, a fat heroine romance and FOOD! I was instantly in love.
But we’re not here to talk about that book.
The other book I checked out “The North Water” was a gritty mix of The Revenant and In the Heart of the Sea. Two characters locked in conflict to survive not only a whaling ship but also the frozen tundra. I was super thrown off by the rape of a young boy in the first five pages (and his rapist stayed true to form throughout the entire book) but there were too many good lines about religion and philosophy for me to stop reading.
Without further ado...
“If he is free, in his current condition, then this wooden table in front of him is also free, and so is this empty glass. And what does free even mean? Such words are paper-thin, they crumble and tear under the slightest pressure. Only actions count, he thinks for the ten-thousandth time, only event. All the rest is vapor, fog. He takes another drink and licks his lips. It is a grave mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission; it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage” (I thought it was super neat when I came across this quote I found a matching “Humans of Argentina” post about it, an old man looks up from reading a magazine on a park bench and says, ““I’ve got it all figured out. Just let time go by and try not to think about very much.”(São Paulo, Brazil)”)
“A man looks forwards and not backwards, that is Baxter’s persistent advice to him. What matters is what happens next. And although Baxter is without a doubt a fucker, a scoundrel, and a deep-dyed charlatan, there’s some small but solid truth to that, he thinks.”
- ‘Why would you believe such things?’ he asks. ‘What good does it do you?’
‘The world we see with our eyes is not the whole truth. Dreams and visions are just as real as matter. What we can imagine or think exists as truly as anything we can touch or smell. Where do our thoughts come from, if not from God?’
‘They come from our experience,’ Sumner says, ‘from what we’ve heard and seen and read, and what’s been told to us.’
Otto shakes his head.
‘If that were true, then no growth or advancement would be possible. The world would be stagnant and unmoving. We would be doomed to live our lives facing backwards.” -
“He finds the lying comes easy enough, of course. Words are just noises in a certain order, and he can use them any way he wishes. Pigs grunt, ducks quack, and men tell lies: that is how it generally goes.” - Henry Drax
