penrosereads

[penrosereads]

Independent bookstores around the country have a particularly clever lifeline, one perfectly suited to the unprecedented moment we find ourselves in. The strange part? It came into being just weeks before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic, and before the bookstores started closing up shop wondering if they’d reopen at all.

The lifeline in question is called Bookshop. 

In simple terms, it’s a super clean, user-friendly online bookstore whose raison d’être is supporting independent bookstores — not simply with exposure or resources (though that’s certainly a factor), but with cold hard cash…

[penrosereads]

Jo Shapcott, Of Mutability

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“The sea sweeps through the house. Sometimes it swept over me, but always I was saved.”

— Piranesi, Susanna Clarke

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Maya Angelou

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“People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep.”

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Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

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“I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.”

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“Men are born soft and supple;

dead, they are stiff and hard.

Plants are born tender and pliant;

dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible

is a disciple of death.

Whoever is soft and yielding

is a disciple of life.

The hard and stiff will be broken.

The soft and supple will prevail.”

- Lao Tzu

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“My mother smiled. ‘I knew my baby wasn’t like that.’

I looked at her. ‘Like what?’

‘Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.’ She paused. ‘I knew you’d decide to be all right again.’”

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“‘What does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man?’

Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, ‘Tenderness.’

That shut me up.”

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“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”

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“I kept shooting impatient glances at the closed boardroom door. My stocking seams were straight, my black shoes cracked, but polished, and my red wool suit flamboyant as my plans. Something old, something new. . . . But I wasn’t getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice—patched, retreaded and approved for the road…”

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“And it is so easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.”

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‘What do they do to you in here?’ He was whispering. ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘They don’t do anything.’

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“This clarity made me able to behave normally, which posed some interesting questions. Was everybody seeing this stuff and acting as though they weren’t? Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act? If some people didn’t see these things, what was the matter with them? Were they blind or something? These questions had me unsettled.”

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“As long as we were willing to be upset, we didn’t have to get jobs or go to school. We could weasel out of anything except eating and taking our medication.”

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“Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion; and the passion should be held in reverence…” - Edgar Allan Poe