I Love Books

I love books. No secret there. When I meet someone I can't help but ask what they're reading. Often it is something that I have read, or want to read, or have heard of, and there is instantly a connection. If, however, the person says "oh, I'm not reading anything" or, even worse "oh, I just don't have time to read," well, that's pretty much the end of THAT converstation. Call me shallow, but I really enjoy crazy, loopy book people.

Because books, well, they just take me places. It's amazing the places I've been without ever leaving the comfort of my couch. I learn so much (and some of it I even remember!). But best of all are the nuggets, which I dog-ear and later type into my "Quotes From Books" folder in my computer. It is the only section of my computer that is actually organized. Hmmmm...I'm sure Dr. Freud would have something to say about THAT.


My bookish friend Suzanne introduced me to Goodreads. I haven't spent much time there, but am loving what I've seen. It's made for book obsessives. I'm always looking for the next great read, and seem to have found my people. If you'd like to be friends on Goodreads let me know - it could be fun!


Listing the books I've read prompted me to go back and read some of my quotes, and so I'm posting a few here. They are from The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. I promise I'll write more about Ecovillage Life tomorrow. But then, reading IS a big part of my life here...

Next to Shakespeare I love Thoreau best. Mrs. Henry made us read portions of Walden Pond, and afterward I’d had fantasies of going to a private garden where T. Ray would never find me. I started appreciating Mother Nature, what she’d done with the world. In my mind she looked like Eleanor Roosevelt.
Pg. 57

…I looked again at the honey jars, at the amber lights swimming inside them, and made myself breathe slowly.

I realized for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don’t even know it.
Pg. 63

The first week at August’s was a consolation, a pure relief. The world will give you that once in a while, a brief time-out; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.
Pg. 83

If the heat goes over 104 degrees in South Carolina, you have to go to bed. It is practically the law. Some people might see it as shiftless behavior, but really, when we’re lying down from the heat, we’re giving our minds time to browse around for new ideas, wondering at the true aim of life, and generally letting things pop into our heads that need to. In the sixth grade there was a boy in my class who had a steel plate in his skull and was always complaining how test answers could never get through to him. Our teacher would say, “Give me a break.”


In a way, though, the boy was right. Every human being on the face of the earth has a steel plate in his head, but if you lie down now and then and get still as you can, it will slide open like elevator doors, letting in all the secret thoughts that have been standing around so patiently, pushing the button for a ride to the top. The real troubles in life happen when those hidden doors stay closed for too long. But that’s just my opinion.
Pg 170

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind. From now on when people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I planned to say, Amnesiac.
Pg. 249