Rick Barry 📚

A great story well told may be the finest art.

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

Stoner had to admit that he had become, in the regard of the younger instructors and the older students, who seemed to come and go before he could firmly attach names to their faces, an almost mythic figure, however shifting and vaious the functions of that figure was.
JOHN WILLIAMS, Stoner

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

—Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never inside—it was a dream.
DENIS JOHNSON, Tree of Smoke

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

It was as if even the little misunderstandings were placed in their path deliberately to better illustrate the workings of grace.
ZADIE SMITH, The Fraud

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

"You have been treasonously consorting with the enemy," he says.
So it is out. "Treasonously consorting": a phrase out of a book.
"We are at peace here," I say, "we have no enemies." There is a silence. "Unless I make a mistake," I say. "Unless we are the enemy."
J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

I have had a lifelong engagement with death, both theoretical and actual, and have written about it many times. Yet, despite the shiver of 'I can't tell if it is or isn't leukaemia', I hadn't received a death sentence. Instead, I had received a life sentence: sentenced to live with my cancer until I died.
JULIAN BARNES, Departure(s)

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person's lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one's soul.
JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE, A Confederacy of Dunces

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

#TolstoyReadalong ANNA KARENINA (P5, C31)
Everything about this little girl was sweet, but for some reason none of it touched her heart. To the first child, though of a man she did not love, had gone all the force of love that had not been satisfied; the girl, born in the most difficult conditions, did not receive a hundredth part of the care that had gone to the first child.

[Athenaeum Book Club @athenaeumbc]

"I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news."

— John Muir

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

And still the College creaked on. Hard-working graduates, with pregnant wives, still wrote dissertations on Dostoevski and Simone de Beauvoir. Literary departments still labored under the impression that Stendhal, Galsworthy, Dreiser, and Mann were great writers.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Pnin

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

The father who found humor in nothing spawned a son who saw humor in everything. It is easy to see how the aloof Judge Clemens, who hated disorder and was emotionally remote, produced a rebellious, devil-may-care son and left him with an enduring ambivalence toward authority figures.
RON CHERNOW, Mark Twain

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

You don't understand music: you hear it. So hear me with your whole body. When you come to read me you will ask why I don't keep to painting and my exhibitions, since I write so rough and disorderly. It's because now I feel the need for words—and what I'm writing is new to me because until now my true word has never been touched. The word is my fourth dimension.
CLARICE LISPECTOR, Água Viva

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

Steinbeck's "Doc" of the novel is a version of marine biologist and great friend, Ed Ricketts. The book's dedication reads

For ED RICKETTS who knows why or should

Steinbeck and Ricketts had co-authored SEA OF CORTEZ (1941), four years before CANNERY ROW appeared.

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

Doc would listen to any kind of nonsense and change it for you to a kind of wisdom. His mind had no horizon—and his sympathy had no warp. He could talk to children, telling them very profound things so that they understood. He lived in a world of wonders, of excitement. He was concupiscent as a rabbit and gentle as hell. Anyone who knew him was indebted to him. and everyone who thought of him thought next, "I really must do something nice for Doc."

[DonPJenn @DonPJenn]

"Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."

Will Durant

[Chapter-a-Day Read-Along @chapteraday365]

#tolstoyreadalong

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

The greatest poet forms the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is. He drags the dead out of their coffins and stands them again on their feet…he says to the past, Rise and walk before me that I may realize you.
WALT WHITMAN #WhitmanWednesday

[Rick Barry 📚 @RickBarry44]

#TolstoyReadalong ANNA KARENINA (P5, C30)
Though she had just said that he was better and kinder than she, feelings of loathing and spite towards him and envy about her son came over her as she glanced quickly at him, taking in his whole figure in all its details. with a swift movement she lowered her veil and, quickening her pace, all but ran out of the room.