Books I Like: The High Mountains of Portugal

 

My favorite lines frim this book:

Human life is no more than this: an attempt to feel at home while racing towards oblivion.

What are we without the ones we love?

And weeping is undignified. It lies beyond the tutorials of etiquette and remains a personal idiom, individual in its expression.

What luck to live in a land that so unceasingly agrees to be agreeable.

..but the knowledge he gains from it is purely theoretical. Its application is the rub.

Because to suffer and do nothing is to be nothing, while to suffer and do something is to become someone.

How one gets lost can vary, but the state of being lost, the feeling of it, is always the same: paralysis, anger, lethargy, despair.

To her, writing is making stock and reading is sipping broth, but only the spoken word is the full roasted chicken. And so she talks.

She was the rich earth and the sun and the rain; he was merely the farmer who got the crop going.

A story is a wedding in which we listeners are the groom watching the bride coming up the aisle.

Faith is grand but impractical: How does one live an eternal idea in a daily way? It’s so much easier to be reasonable. Reason is practical, its rewards are immediate, its workings are clear. But alas, reason is blind. Reason, on its own, leads us nowhere, especially in the face of adversity.

That’s the nature of grief: It’s a creature with many arms but few legs, and it staggers about, searching for support.

The speeches, the endless posturing, the cynical scheming, the swollen egos, the arrogant aides, the merciless media, the stifling minutiae, the scientific bureaucracy, the microscopic betterment of humanity—all are hallmarks of democracy, he recognizes. Democracy is such a crazy, wonderful thing.

Each animal is like a piece of a puzzle, and wherever it settles, it belongs, clicking into place perfectly.

He isn’t going to spend the rest of his life waiting around Ottawa for his son to find more time for him.

“Right. You got along. And when you didn’t, you argued and you coped.

It’s a lesson hard learned, just to sit there and be.