Under The Covers

Looking for the tiny truths scattered under the covers our favorite (and not so favorite) books (and albums).

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"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you."

-Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

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"If you want to be remembered, give yourself away."

-William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth

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“Come, ye weary, heavy laden, lost and ruined by the fall, if you tarry till your better, you will never come at all.”

-”Come Ye Sinners”, 

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“I believe it doesn't matter what it is, as long as you can find something concrete to keep you busy while you are living your meaningless life.” 

-Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

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“Of course, there’re plenty of people more fortunate than I am. But that doesn’t mean I’ve ever felt envious of them. I figure everybody’s life is different.”

-Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

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"We think that to find ourselves we need to turn inward, examining the intricacies of origin, the shaping forces of personality. But 'I' is just as much to be found in the world; looking outward we experience the me who for the seeing. Say what you see and you experience yourself through your style of seeing and saying."

-Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

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"It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg."

-Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

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"What does it mean then, to be as solid as a rock? Better to consider the fragility of rock and its transformation into soil."

-William Bryant Logan, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth

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"Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.”

-Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

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"There is always an enormous temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end".

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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"Beauty is real. I could never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it".

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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"Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you experience grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall".

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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"Hide yourself under a bushel quickly, for if your real usefulness were known to the world you would soon be knocked down to the highest bidder by the public auctioneer. Why do men and women like to advertise themselves so much?"

-Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea

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"I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment when I was lifted and struck".

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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"Insignificance creeps, it dawns, it gives you hope, then delusion, then one day, when you're not looking, it's there at your front door, on your desk, in the mirror, or not, not any of that, it's the lack of all that. One day, when you're not looking, it's not looking, no one is".

-Charles Yu, How to the Live Safely in a Sciencefictional Universe

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"Perhaps we reveal too much of ourselves in small things because we have so little of the great to conceal."

-Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea

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“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

-Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being