26
" Second hand books had so much life in them. They'd lived, sometimes in many homes, or maybe just one. They'd been on airplanes, traveled to sunny beaches, or crowded into a backpack and taken high up a mountain where the air thinned." Some had been held aloft tepid rose-scented baths, and thickened and warped with moisture. Others had child-like scrawls on the acknowledgement page, little fingers looking for a blank space to leave their mark. Then there were the pristine novels, ones that had been read carefully, bookmarks used, almost like their owner barely pried the pages open so loathe were they to damage their treasure.I loved them all.And I found it hard to part with them. Though years of book selling had steeled me. I had to let them go, and each time made a fervent wish they'd be read well, and often.Missy, my best friend, said I was completely cuckoo, and that I spent too much time alone in my shadowy shop, because I believed my books communicated with me. A soft sigh here, as they stretched their bindings when dawn broke, or a hum, as they anticipated a customer hovering close who might run a hand along their cover, tempting them to flutter their pages hello. Books were fussy when it came to their owners, and gave off a type of sound, an almost imperceptible whirr, when the right person was near. Most people weren't aware that books chose us, at the time when we needed them. "
31
" Suffice to say, the dream writer had a way of phrasing things. She could depict the curve of a cucumber, the shape of a sunbeam, the endearing, velvety tilt of a peach, in just such a way that she earned her living selling dreams. One simply made a selection, read it in solitude, and let it percolate till sleep. People swore they fell directly into her renderings, and one even asked if the dream writer could write a dream of dreaming forever. The dream writer could not do this, but she hired dream apprentices to expand the reach of her dreams and she wrote dreams for herself in which she would sit at a desk, pen in hand, and write even more dreams. This nearly doubled her output. "
― Meia Geddes , Love Letters to the World
34
" Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days. "
― Terry Pratchett , Thud! (Discworld, #34; City Watch #7)
38
" Laura never again came to the drugstore as long as I continued to work there.
The next time I saw her, she was a wreck of a woman, notorious around black Roxbury, in and out of jail.
She had finished high school, but by then she was already going the wrong way.
Defying her grandmother, she had started going out late and drinking liquor.
This led to dope, and that to selling herself to men. Learning to hate the men who bought her, she also became a Lesbian.
One of the shames I have carried for years is that I blame myself for all of this.
To have treated her as I did for a white woman made the blow doubly heavy.
The only excuse I can offer is that like so many of my black brothers today, I was just deaf, dumb, and blind. "
― Malcolm X , The Autobiography of Malcolm X
39
" Danny explained, “Reforms always create winners and losers, and the losers will always fight harder than the winners.” How did you get the losers to accept change? The prevailing strategy on the Israeli farms – which wasn’t working very well – was to bully or argue with the people who needed to change. The psychologist Kurt Lewin had suggested persuasively that, rather than selling people on some change, you were better off identifying the reasons for their resistance, and addressing those. Imagine a plank held in place by a spring on either side of it, Danny told the students. How do you move it? Well, you can increase the force on one side of the plank. Or you can reduce the force on the other side. “In one case the overall tension is reduced,” he said, “and in the other it is increased.” And that was a sort of proof that there was an advantage in reducing the tensions. “It’s a key idea,” said Danny. “Making it easy to change. "
― Michael Lewis , The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds