Some quotations that I didn't enter when I read the book in May.
“Things are needy. They take up space. They want attention, and they will drive you mad if you let them.”
[reminds me of the Stephen King quotation from Under the Dome... feed me]
“Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”
“Because in the Bindery, where phenomena are still Unbound, stories have not yet learned to behave in a linear fashion, and all the myriad things of the world are simultaneously emergent, occurring in the same present moment, coterminous with you. Unbound, you could see the universe becoming, clouds of star dust, emanations from the warm little pond, from whose gaseous bubbling all of life is born.”
“it took me a while to learn how to tune my ears so I could hear the Unmade things over all the noise that the Made things were making.”
“(Pro captu lectoris) habent sua fata libelli. (According to the capabilities of the reader) books have their own destinies. —Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”
“What Slavoj said was this: People are born from the womb of the world with different sensitivities, and the world needs every single one of you to experience it fully, so that it might be fully experienced. If even one person were left out, the world would be diminished. And he said you don’t have to worry about being creative. The world is creative, endlessly so, and its generative nature is part of who you are. The world has given you the eyes to see the beauty of its mountains and rivers, and the ears to hear the music of its wind and sea, and the voice you need to tell it. We books are evidence that this is so. We are here to help you.”
“Maybe this was her talent, she thought, to see beauty in small things, and if so, then she was grateful.”
Already Broken
“But Hojo-san! The teacup isn’t broken!” He looked up, surprised. “To me, it is,” he said. “It is the nature of a teacup to be broken. That is why it is so beautiful now, and why I appreciate it when I can still drink from it.” He looked at it fondly, took a last sip, and then placed the empty cup carefully back on the tray. “When it is gone, it is gone.” That day, my teacher gave me a priceless lesson in the impermanence of form, and the empty nature of all things.”
“The earthquake shook us awake, and the tsunami washed away our delusions. It caused us to question our values and our attachment to material possessions. When everything I think of as mine—my belongings, my family, my life—can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken. Knowing this, we can appreciate each thing as it is, and love each other as we are—completely, unconditionally, without expectation or disappointment. Life is even more beautiful this way, don’t you think?”
[It's not just our possessions that are already broken...]
“It's capitalism that's crazy. It's neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that's crazy. It's the fucking meritocracy that tells you that feeling sad is wrong and it's your fault if you're broken, but hey, capitalism can fix you! Just take these miracle pills and go shopping and buy yourself some new shit! It's the doctors and shrinks and corporate medicine and Big Pharma, making billions of dollars telling us we're crazy and then peddling us their so-called cures. That's fucking crazy...”
“Let me tell you something about poetry, young schoolboy. Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem.” He sighed. “In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems.”
“Perhaps you have heard the Zen motto that says, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears”?”
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