The English Spy

By Daniel Silva

I liked what this sentence conjured up in my mind:



.....had only limited accommodation with the modern world.

From Blossoms and Shadows

by Lian Hearn

Then everyone spoke of the dead man's qualities..........and the words, together with the sake we drank, and the flowers and incense, stitched death up so that it was no longer a terrifying rent in the fabric of our lives but something quite natural.

What a beautiful play of words

......small yet enormous moments in which destinies pivot

and another one, talking about the time when...

...the elaborate universe of priorities we’ve spent a lifetime constructing, combusts into stardust.

Powerful picture

 .......one of those mundane anchors of constancy by which we hang on to existence.

Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

The intimate tango of sadness and radiance is ultimately what gives his music its timeless edge in penetrating the soul.

Listen to Tchaikovsky after reading this and absorb the depth and beauty of his music...let it go deep into your soul.

Go Set A Watchman

Historical events lose their edges, and even their shapes, as they get recalled, pulled out of the depths of time.

Our emotions over events past get colored - they become brighter or darker, shaded or clear.

Our memories play hide-and-seek, remember some things, forget others...some memories seem very different maybe even alien.

The way we view people and events from past stages in life is naturally totally different from how we view them in the present.

.....simply because we have changed over the years.


Read Harper Lee's 'Go Set A Watchman' keeping these in mind. And along the way re-read and revise the recorded History of the times.

It's a fantastic book...

From 'An Unnecessary Woman' by Rabih Alameddine

Words, phrases and sentences to think about:


1. Alain Robbe-Grillet once wrote that the worst thing to happen to the novel was the arrival of psychology. ....he meant that now we all expect to understand the motivation behind each character's actions. Novels tend to lose their flavor because we are 'always supposed to infer causality.'

2. 'None of us knows how to deal with the aleatory nature of pain.'

3. 'If you think Madame Bovary commits adultery because she's trying to escape the banality of Pleistocene morals, then her betrayals are not yours.'

4. '...I do what makes me happy sometimes. I don't suffer from anhedonia after all.'

5. 'When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.'