Lately I’ve been thinking about how we could all use a little more joy in our lives. When I was young, the library at my school had the best displays seasonal displays. They were bright, creative, and made me never want to leave the shelves. (Which wasn’t all that out of character, now that I… Continue reading Holiday Library Displays for When a Book Tree Isn’t Enough
“Home is the place you return to when you have finally lost your soul. Home is the place where life is born, not the place of your birth, but the place where you seek rebirth. When you no longer have to remember which tale of your own past is true and which is an invention,… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: Karen Maitland’s ‘Company of Liars’
“It was the first time! Just because there weren’t fireworks the first time doesn’t mean there will never be fireworks. We’re human; we’re adults; we teach each other; we communicate; fireworks don’t just go off, wham-bang; fireworks evolve!’ Awestruck by the utter, asinine nonsense of this metaphor, everyone is still. Into the stillness, the ample… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: ‘Love Walked In”
For many of us, the scent of a book represents windows into innumerable worlds. Chemists have tried to translate this experience and have described books as smelling grassy and acidic with hints of vanilla and mustiness. However, that combination of scents does not simply arise through happenstance. Traditionally printed books produce those smells as a result of… Continue reading Stoking a Hunger: The Scent of a Book
“Each one of us continues to carry the heart of each self we’ve ever been, at every stage along the way, and a chaos of everything good and rotten. And we have to carry this weight all alone, through each day that we live. We try to be as nice as we can to the… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: Banana Yoshimoto’s ‘Goodbye Tsugumi’
“What a wonderful song, she thought – everything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the den with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘This Side of Paradise’
“There’s a word for it,” she told me, “in French, for when you have a lingering impression of something having passed by. Sillage. I always think of it when a firework explodes and lights up the smoke from the ones before it.” “That’s a terrible word,” I teased. “It’s like an excuse for holding onto… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: ‘The Beginning of Everything’
“For eight years I dreamed of fire. Trees ignited as I passed them; oceans burned. The sugary smoke settled in my hair as I slept, the scent like a cloud left on my pillow as I rose. Even so, the moment my mattress started to burn, I bolted awake. The sharp, chemical smell was nothing like… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: ‘The Language of Flowers’
“I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: ‘The Orchid Thief’
“I had traveled from Spain into Morocco and from there south to the Atlas Mountains, at the edge of the Sahara Desert…one night, in a youth hostel that was more like a stable, I woke and walked out into a snowstorm. But it wasn’t the snow I was used to in Minnesota, or anywhere else… Continue reading Friday Quick Quote: ‘The End of Night’
Kristen Twardowski 