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83a8a57
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I will never be able to read my mothers favourite books without thinking of her - an when I pass them on or recommend them, I'll know that some of what made her goes with them; that some of my mother will live on in those readers, readers who may be inspired to love the way loved and do their own version of what she did in the world.
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Will Schwalbe |
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19a4896
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What I suddenly understood was that a thank-you note isn't the price you pay for receiving a gift, as so many children think it is, a kind of minimum tribute or toll, but an opportunity to count your blessings. And gratitude isn't what you give in exchange for something; it's what you feel when you are blessed--blessed to have family and friends who care about you, and who want to see you happy. Hence the joy from thanking.
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Will Schwalbe |
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89c1a4d
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It's not hard to read about death abstractly. I do find it tough when a character I love dies, of course. You can truly miss characters. Not like you miss people, but you can still miss them.
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reading
death
life
missing-someone
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Will Schwalbe |
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a498200
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One of Mom's favorite passages from Gilead was: "This is an important thing, which I have told many people, and which my father told me, and which his father told him. When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, what is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation.?"...But the question from Gilead, Mom said, was always the thing you n..
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Will Schwalbe |
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62981a3
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One of the many things I love about bound books is their sheer physicality. Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence. Sure, sometimes they'll elude you by hiding in improbable places... But at other times they'll confront you, and you'll literally stumble over some tomes you hadn't thought about in weeks or years. I often seek electronic books, but they never come after me. They may make me f..
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Will Schwalbe |
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583114c
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I was learning that when you're with someone who is dying, you may need to celebrate the past, live the present, and mourn the future all at the same time.
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time
memories
dying
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Will Schwalbe |
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ba70268
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Reading and naps, two of life's greatest pleasures, go especially well together.
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reading
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Will Schwalbe |
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75e2708
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mindfulness - it isn't a trick or a gimmick. It's being present in the moment. When I'm with you, I'm with you. Right now. That's all. No more and no less.
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Will Schwalbe |
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d984380
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books are the most powerful tool in the human arsenal, that reading all kinds of books, in whatever format you choose - electronic (even though that wasn't for her) or printed, or audio - is the grandest entertainment, and also is how you take part in human conversation.
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mankind
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Will Schwalbe |
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b37d792
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Everyone doesn't have to do everything," she told me. "People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I've had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created by other people, things I could never make or do. I wouldn't trade that for anything."
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inspirational
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Will Schwalbe |
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288cda2
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If our family was an airline, Mom was the hub and we were the spokes. You rarely went anywhere nonstop; you went via Mom, who directed the traffic flow and determined the priorities: which family member was cleared for takeoff or landing. Even my father was not immune to Mom's scheduling, though he was given more leeway than the rest of us.
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mom
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Will Schwalbe |
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8c65ee1
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There are certain books that I mean to read and keep stacked by my bedside. I even take them on trips. Some of my books should be awarded their own frequent-flier miles, they've traveled so much. I take these volumes on flight after flight with the best of intentions and then end up reading anything and everything else. (Sky Mall! Golf Digest!)
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Will Schwalbe |
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8cbe568
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I'm talking about those novels where the characters aren't really interesting and you don't care about them or anything they care about. It's those books I won't read anymore. There's too much else to read--books about people and things that matter, books about life and death.
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reading
death
life
characters
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Will Schwalbe |
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044b5a9
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It's cruelty that gets to me. Still, it's important to read about cruelty. "Why is it important?" Because when you read about it, it's easier to recognize. That was always the hardest thing in the refugee camps--to hear the stories of the people who had been raped or mutilated or forced to watch a parent or a sister or a child be raped or killed. It's very hard to come face-to-face with such cruelty. But people can be cruel in lots of ways..
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Will Schwalbe |
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1efc780
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Books have played a role in almost every one of the world's great civil and human rights movements, but only because people who read them decided to act. Reading brings with it responsibility.
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inspirational
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Will Schwalbe |
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238e308
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Throughout her life, whenever Mom was sad or confuse or disoriented, she could never concentrate on television, she said, but always sought refuge in a book. Books focused her mind, calmed her, took her outside of herself; television jangled her nerves.
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Will Schwalbe |
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f21454f
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For this day only is ours, we are dead to yesterday, and we are not yet born to the morrow.
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Will Schwalbe |
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55563dc
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Kabat-Zinn writes, "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf."
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Will Schwalbe |
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0d2f9d7
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Books speak to us thoughtfully, one at a time. They demand our attention. And they demand that we briefly put aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else's. There's one questions I think we should ask one another a lot more often, and that's "what are you reading?"
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Will Schwalbe |
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ec4fc6d
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Electronic books live out of sight and out of mind. But printed books have body, presence.
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electronic-books
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Will Schwalbe |
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25411bc
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Good books often answer questions you didn't even know you wanted to ask
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reading
questions-and-answers
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Will Schwalbe |
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912a86e
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There was one sure way to avoid being assigned an impromptu chore in our house - be it taking out the trash or cleaning your room - and that was to have your face buried in a book. Like churches during the Middle Ages, books conferred instant sanctuary. Once you entered one, you couldn't be disturbed. They didn't give you immunity from prosecution if you'd done something wrong - just a temporary reprieve. But we quickly learned you had to b..
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sanctuary
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Will Schwalbe |
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f08f53a
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Books had always been a way for my mother and me to introduce and explore topics that concerned us but made us uneasy, and they had also always given us something to talk about when we were stressed or anxious.
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Will Schwalbe |
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8a7fee9
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books provided much-needed ballast - something we both craved, amid the chaos and upheaval...
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books
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Will Schwalbe |
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d27544f
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And I'm also talking about kindness, not just about being nice. You can be gruff or abrupt and still be kind. Kindness has much more to do with what you do than how you do it.
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Will Schwalbe |
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753a775
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The idea is that if you practice the Naikan part of Constructive Living, life becomes a series of small miracles, and you may start to notice everything that goes right in a typical life and not the few things that go wrong.
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Will Schwalbe |
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a699863
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What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?
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Will Schwalbe |
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dccafed
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In December 2008, I had the book with me while we waited for Dr. O'Reilly. Mom had already finished it. Every time I put the book down to go grab some mocha, or check my email, or make a call, I returned to find Mom rereading it, sneakily wolfing down passages as though I'd left behind a bag of cookies, not a book, and she was scooping up crumbs behind my back.
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Will Schwalbe |
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2cba608
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And there's something you can always tell people who want to learn more about the world and who don't know how to find a cause to support. You can always tell them to read.
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Will Schwalbe |
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1a98bd1
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If you stayed at home, you might not get the opportunity to go to that place again. But if you went, you could always com back.
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Will Schwalbe |
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c4fbc48
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I used to say that the greatest gift you could ever give anyone is a book. But I don't say that anymore because I no longer think it's true. I now say that a book is the second greatest gift. I've come to believe that the greatest gift you can give people is to take the time to talk with them about a book you've shared. A book is a great gift; the gift of your interest and attention is even greater.
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Will Schwalbe |
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5931267
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I read to live. I read for life.
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inspirational
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Will Schwalbe |
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58b70d2
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Lin Yutang also believed that reading is an art. One chapter of the Importance of Living is devoted to "the Art of Reading." Lin writes that, "the man who has not the habit of reading is imprisoned in his immediate world, in respect to time and space. His life falls into a set routine; he is limited to contact and conversation with a few friends and acquaintances, and he sees only what happens in his immediate neighborhood."
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Will Schwalbe |
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5bb6428
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in the eyes of her oldest friends and colleagues and extended family, she wasn't a painfully thin seventy-five-year-old gray haired woman dying of cancer- she was a grade school class president, the young friend you gossiped with, a date or double date, someone to share a tent with in Darfur, a fellow election monitor in Bosnia, a mentor, a teacher you'd laughed within a classroom or a faculty lounge, or the board member you'd groaned with ..
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Will Schwalbe |
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805f9f2
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You can only do what you can, and what doesn't get done, just doesn't get done.
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positivity
productivity
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Will Schwalbe |
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8973fce
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I'm not the same reader when I finish a book as I was when I started, brains are tangles of pathways, and reading creates new ones. Every book changes your life. So I like to ask; How is this book changing mine?
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Will Schwalbe |
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e4a4cb3
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two different kinds of Japanese psychotherapies, one based on getting people to stop using feelings as an excuse for their actions and the other based on getting people to practice gratitude.
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gratitude
psychotherapy
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Will Schwalbe |
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d436c0f
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It's not that I liked lunacy for the sake of lunacy, but if a writer can truly surprise me without throwing logic completely out the window, then that writer has me for good. Most book surprises aren't surprising at all but follow a formula, like the dead body that's certain to lurch out of a wreck being explored by deep-sea divers in just about every book that involves wrecks and divers.
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Will Schwalbe |
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02164fd
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If heathen prayers were indeed the best of all, then mine should count big time.
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Will Schwalbe |
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6961f2a
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All readers have reading in common.
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Will Schwalbe |
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dd00a1d
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Lahiri's characters, just like people all around us, are constantly telling each other important things, but not necessarily in words.
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will schwalbe |
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d520057
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Yes," Mom said. "People may want to kill themselves. But no one wants to be depressed, or in pain, or lonely, or hurt."
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Will Schwalbe |
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f60ad64
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No one in the family has ever really gotten over Bob's death. We talk of him daily, recounting stories and imagining what his reactions would be to new books and recent events. He remains for my family the perfect model of how you can be gone but ever present in the lives of people who loved you, in the same way that your favorite books stay with you for your entire life, no matter how long it's been since you turned the last page.
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Will Schwalbe |
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d8d3c9a
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life depends on what she thinks of as 'big bursts' and 'little bursts.' Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee.
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Will Schwalbe |