High Fidelity like A Boss

“In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn. That’s OK; he’s a songwriter, after all, and he needs simple choices like that in his songs. But nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot.”

Image from Here

Just finished reading High Fidelity by Nick Hornby! More quotes and review coming soon, meh... just coming. How bout that?

My Petition For More Space Quotes

From the book's jacket:

Poynter has been on the line since before dawn, as are thousands of others, pressed together, waiting their turns at the window to present their individual petitions. His is for more space--a notion so preposterous that when it is discovered it shocks, reverberates down the line, almost triggering violent reactions. In front of Poynter, so tightly jammed against him that he can see no more than the side of her face, is a girl petitioning to change her job. And, locked together in this fearful proximity, they talk, explore their predicaments, and perhaps fall in love.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from My Petition For More Space, by John Hersey

“Nowadays it takes great vanity, great force of character, a gift for climbing on others’ backs, tirelessness, and doubtless a pinch of talent for a man to become famous. To stay famous is almost impossible.”

“The woman’s serenity moves me very deeply—it reaches down to the pool of strong feelings in my chest... I think—perhaps I merely imagine—that there is something more. She has come to terms with what bothers the rest of us. What is her secret? I wish I had the nerve to shout to her across all the people and ask her: What is your secret? In her nodding way she glances at our group and sees us staring at her. She does not smile, and the light changes in her eyes. She guards the secret.”

“Bureaucracy attracts such mediocre people; we are in the hands of imbeciles.”

           

            “Let’s not play this game. I’d rather imagine your face. You’re like a character in a novel; I have to create

             your face myself”

            “But then when you see me…”

            “You’ll be in the movie made from the book.”

            “You won’t like seeing a different face from the one you’ve made up.”

            “If it’s a good movie, it won’t matter.”

“It takes a surprisingly long time to detect stupidity of certain sorts in a person.”

“The time will come—I trust it will—when, hoping to pry open a new kind of future, I will share my past with the girl in front of me… I will look straight into her eyes (what color are they? How far apart are they?), and I will say that I want to tell her everything, but I will soon catch myself lying.

“I have always believed that a person’s name is an aspect of his temperament. It has to be.”

“Are the selfish after all most vulnerable? No, that is too easy. There are kinds and kinds of selfishness. His is all sensory. Also, he is a particular sort of hedonist: a stupid hedonist.”

“It comes to me that he is the sort of human being who will survive. He will survive anything. Storm, famine, mob, war, massacre, pressure of numbers. In order to survive, he will with even-handed equanimity destroy and rescue. Partner and enemy, chopper and baton, coward and hero—he conducts equally well on alternating and direct current”

“This oily glass in the amber light blocks the primary sense—the sense which, more than all the others, defines space, gives lips and breasts and thighs reality and literature its power. And guides human judgment—for eyes look into eyes to find the elusive truth that spoken words so often blur. The window’s glass renders that kind of truth-seeking impossible here. This is what makes authority so infuriating: It always hides its eyes.”

“She moves behind me from my left to my right, indiscriminately wishing people luck. Lack of discrimination is just as much a form of hatred as lack of feeling; I guess I must face it that this jolly grandmother hates everybody.”

“Now as I hurry toward the street door, that hope having been let whooshingly out of me like compressed air from a tank, I am nevertheless full of hope all over again.”


It was a lovely read! I'll post a review for you all soon.

Charles Dickens' Great Expectations Quotes

Here are some of my favorite quotes from the novel.

“With this boy! Why he is a common laboring-boy!”

I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer—only it seemed so unlikely—‘Well? You can break his heart.’

‘What do you play, boy?’ asked Estella of myself, with the greatest disdain.

‘Nothing but beggar my neighbor, Miss’

‘Beggar him,’ said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to cards.

David Lean's Great Expectations

“Lookee here Pip, at what is said to you by a true friend. If you can’t get to be oncommon through going straight, you’ll never do it through going crooked. So don’t tell no more on ‘em, Pip, and live well and die happy.”

“That was a memorable day for me, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts”

“Once for all; I knew to my sorrow... that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I loved her"

“[Miss Havisham] drew an arm around my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as she sat in the chair. ‘Love her, love her, love her! How does she use you?’

Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question at all), she repeated, ‘Love her, love her, love her! If she favours you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to pieces—and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper—love her, love her!”

David Lean's Great Expectations

“’What a hopeful disposition you have!’ said I, gratefully admiring his cheery ways.

‘I ought to have,’ said Herbert, ‘for I have not much else. ‘”

“We produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and a goodly show of writing and blotting paper. For there was something very comfortable in having plenty of stationary.”

“As he pretended not to see me, I pretended not to see him. It was a very lame pretense on both sides.”

“You will get me out of your thoughts in a week”

“Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here…You have been in ever prospect I have ever seen since—on the river, on the sails of the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness, in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become acquainted with… Estella, to the last hour of my life, you cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation I associate you only with the good, and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you’

In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got these broken words out of myself, I don’t know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an inward wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering moments, and so I left her.”

David Lean's Great Expectations. Photo from Hollywood.com

“We can no more see the bottom of the next few hours, than we can see the bottom of this river what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can’t no more hold their tide than I can hold this. And it’s run through my fingers and gone, you see!’ holding up his dripping hand.”

I'll have a review for you soon! Or maybe I won't. I'm not sure what to say about this novel...

Heaven is for Real Review

It's that time again, time for another

Heaven is For Real:

A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back

by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent

I shall waste no time on a plot summary, because I'm pretty sure you can gather what this one is about. At just over 150 pages, the nonfiction account of the author's three year old son's experiences in heaven is a quick read. I think it took me all of one afternoon to finish?

This one will be tough to review because I don't know where you stand on the aspect of the Christian Faith. I don't want to get into any arguments about whether or not Heaven exists, if it is physically possible to be dead and come back to life, or whether you are hallucinating and not actually experiencing Heaven.

Allz I knowz is that this is a sweet little book that is very interesting, informative and really makes you ponder the world and your place in it. Todd Burpo did an excellent job conveying his own doubt that this actually happened to little Colton, but by the end of the book he and pretty much everyone who reads it are sold.

So whether you consider its content fact or fiction, It's worth three hours of your life.

If you want a more in depth review that gets into all that deep stuff, read this. 

I like these brief reviews, what do you think?

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Review

Heads up, the internet is ruining our attention spans. It's one thing if you're reading a novel or in a class, focusing isn't too much of an issue because your brain knows it's supposed to be focusing. But even the concept of internet surfing means that your brain knows it's free to wander, resulting in your getting bored really, really easily and clicking to the next thing that sparks your interest.

It's especially bad with blogs. When I visit a blog, after reading about twenty words all I see is...

Image from here

And the last thing I want to do is bore you! So because I don't have the time to write an English paper and because you don't have the time to read it, I would like to present a new segment. It's called the

of 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 

by Betty Smith

And yes that is an allusion to the novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. That's next on my list of things to read.

Alright, so let's get started. 

Although it's considered classic American literature, I didn't have too high of expectations for this one. I just needed something to take to the beach for a long weekend. Turns out, the novel is really quite good! Basically, it's the coming of age story of a young girl, Francie, growing up in tenement housing in the early 1900's. Want more summary than that? Google man. It works wonders ;)

It's about four hundred pages but reads much shorter. I can definitely see how it was easily made into a screenplay and play. It's just a great, entertaining story. Yes there are major themes about the importance of education, the equality of all (women, men, the poor, the wealthy, Irish, Jews, Germans, etc.) and you can learn a lot about American history during an integral time, but I'm not in American lit anymore so that's where the analyzing stops. 

At its core, the novel is just an entertaining and sweet story of a girl and her family. It wasn't life changing or mind altering but I'm happy to have read it. If you like history, definitely read it. If you like stories where good always wins and if you do the right thing you come out on top fine and dandy, read it. It's a feel good, nostalgic sort of book. 

Men can skip it, but women should read it and that's all Imma say about that.

See now, that wasn't so bad, was it?

I'm planning a Flash Mob, shhhh!

Just kidding. I'm planning to tell you about this book...

You'll have to forgive me because I read the book three weeks ago and so this helter skelter review is cooked up from pure memory. 

Alrighty then, so let's get started. I won't go too in-depth because I am not used to all the terminology the genius Bill Wasik uses, but basically And Then There's This is my perfect nonfiction novel. In layman's terms, he discusses how the internet and viral culture has affected our lives, our businesses, our relationships and our attention spans. Wasik, the inventor of the flashmob, is a man after my own heart. He must know that I care a lot about minuscule facts about the Entertainment Industry and culture in general. He loaded his book up with them just so people like me would be happy! Awww.

What really got me is that the book is just. so. interesting. For me, as a blogger and an aspiring free lancer, Wasik offers invaluable insight into the way the Internet works. He discusses amateurism on the Internet vs. big business corporations and teaches you how to build an audience through observation and experimentation. 

Wasik uses his own experiments to provide some insight into this whole meme, viral, how does this work exactly? thing that we call the Internet. For instance, he was interested in the concept of buzz and how quickly indie "it" bands are glorified and then forgotten in mere months. He created a website to stir up antibuzz for indie music darlings Peter Bjorn and John to see if that would slow down their actual "buzz" (Hint, it didn't). And of course there was that whole flash mob thing...

Wasik's main purpose, however, for writing And Then There's This is not to give you blogging tips, talk about Swedish musicians or get you to be at a certain place on a certain date. Wasik tracks the memes, nanostories and microtrends that define the Entertainment Industry, Politics, Advertising, and much more to teach us about ourselves. It's psychology gone viral.

In short, I would say read this one at least once in your life, preferably within the next two years before it becomes obsolete (gotta love that fast churning culture we have). The novel is humorous, short, easy to read and engrossing. You won't even know you're learning things until you bust something out in a conversation with someone like I did! "Did you know, that whenever you post a link to facebook, send a youtube video or click on an online article, you are in effect becoming a trendsetter?"

If you are like me and have an abnormal interest in viral culture, then I would say it's safe to buy a copy, grab a pencil and get started.

Also, I'm sure Bill Wasik would want you to feel free to post your favorite quotes to facebook, maybe get the book trending on twitter, make a video of your reactions as you read and post it to youtube, listen to some indie music as you peruse and definitely, definitely blog about it. 

Well, One down... 

Que Sera Sera

For months I haven't known what to do with this blog. I love the concept, not the blog. Which is incredibly ironic because the blog title is taken from a poem of the same name, in which a poet's muse confronts him with anger because he loves the idea of her... not her.

Guilty as charged. 

Basically, I am unsure of what to do here. I want to keep going because you people seem to like what I had going on, but I'm not sure how passionate or devoted to this blog I will be. Clearly, my cup has not runneth over in the inspiration department since my last post was on *looking* February 16. Yikes!

We'll just play it by ear. If I get the urge to post, then I will. If I don't, then I won't.

Que Sera Sera

Whatever Will Be, Will Be.