Head held high and lips parted, she breathed in the music, sending it through her torso and arms and legs the way the Tai Chi teacher told us to breath the air, transforming it into...

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself–the task of a lifetime–becomes the answer.

The stillness and stasis of bed are the perfect opposite of travel: inertia is what I’ve come to consider the default mode, existentially and electronically speaking. Bed, its utter inactivity, offers a glimpse of eternity,...

My head aches, my eyes burn, my arms and legs have given up, and my face in the mirror has a grayish cast. The bed, across the room, calls in its unmistakable lover’s croon, Come...

I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?

Reading teaches us receptivity….It teaches us to receive, in stillness and attentiveness, a voice possessed temporarily, on loan….And as we grow accustomed to receiving books in stillness and attentiveness, so we can grow to receive...

What a feat of transmission: the emotive powers of the book, with no local habitation, pass safely from writer to reader, unmangled by printing and binding and shipping, renewed and available whenever we open it.

How did she do it, I’d always wondered. Dancing with Q., I understood. Once in a while the pain falls asleep on the job, and the experienced sufferer knows enough to seize such moments swiftly...

Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.the Tai Chi instructor

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn’t give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more...

In books I found explicitly, flamboyantly, everything censored in life.

Nothing is as horrendous as imagining the times of happiness from an environment which is that of hell.