Recently read

As I read a book I dog-ear pages that contain a phrase or sentiment that seems either particularly true or particularly beautiful to me (or best yet, both... I think language, like architecture or design, is at it's best when both function and form are excellent, when it is at the same time useful and beautiful... but I digress). This is a habit borne partly out of laziness because it seems too much of a task to stop and underline or write in the margins of every book I read; if I were more diligent I would carry on a conversation in this way with every book. When I finish the book or perhaps months or years later, I like to pick it up and thumb through these pages to enjoy these words again. Here are a sample from the book I just finished, Take Me With You by Brad Newsham:

The real world does not present itself in easily absorbed, seven-minute intervals, broken by sixty-second commercial breaks; nor in groups of five eight-hour workdays separated by weekends. The real world marches at you head-on, in jerky bursts of color and boredom and trauma, reminding you that you are alive and small and not in control of anything at all.

This one he stole from Henry Miller... but the theft shows good taste:

We move with eyes shut and ears stopped. We smash walls where doors are waiting to open to the touch; we grope for ladders, forgetting that we have wings; we pray as if God were dead and blind, as if He were in space. No wonder the angels in our midst are unrecognizable. --Nexus