This is Where I Leave You (Ch. 1-3)

Just started reading Jonathan Tropper's This is Where I Leave You (2009). I'm on Chapter 3 and already it's so full of brilliant, dazzling constructions that I have to record a few of them somewhere so I don't forget.

"He is the Paul McCartney of our family: better-looking than the rest of us, always facing a different direction in pictures, and occasionally rumored to be dead."

"My landlords are the Lees, an inscrutable, middle-aged Chinese couple who live in a state of perpetual silence. I have never heard them speak. He performs acupuncture in the living room; she sweeps the sidewalk thrice daily with a handmade straw broom that looks like a theater prop. I wake and fall asleep to the whisper of her frantic bristles on the pavement. Beyond that, they don't seem to exist, and I often wonder why they bothered immigrating. Surely there were plenty of pinched nerves and dust in China."

"We knew marriage could be difficult in the same way that we knew there were starving children in Africa. It was a tragic fact but worlds away from our reality."

Mark Twain's Unexpurgated Autobiography

Despite his hyper-canonized status and over-filled field of researchers, there is no one I would rather spend a lifetime in academia with than Mark Twain. Can't wait for the new book to drop. Here's the story from CBS Sunday Morning.

"Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."

Prose vs. Poetry

Can't remember where I read this, but it was just this weekend (New Canon website? NYT Book Review?) -

"A really good line in prose should be as unchangeable as a line in poetry" - in other words, economy, beauty, truth, etc. Like Mill says (and Stephen Daedelus echoes) - some novels are poetry, some poetry is just verse.

Great minds on education

"The greatest success of education occurs when the student learns to reject claims that are unsupported by reliable evidence - including his own." - My old French teacher, James Higby

Great minds on literature, part 1

"I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker." - Thomas Hardy