Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World
Anthony Doerr
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Just when we think we have a system, ...the system collapses. Just when we know our way around, we get lost. Just when we think we know what's coming next, everything changes.”
“Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw— actually saw— a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs.”
“A good journal entry- like a good song, or sketch, or photograph- ought to break up the habitual and life away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought to be a love letter to the world.”
“Watching teething babies is like watching over a thermonuclear reactor--it is best done in shifts, by well-rested people.”
“Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from. It is not-knowing, that old, old thing, that allows everything to be renewed.”
“Whoever says adults are better at paying attention than children is wrong: we're too busying filtering out the world, focusing on some task or another, paying no attention. Our kids are the ones discovering new contents all day long.”
“And doesn't a writer do the same thing? Isn't she knitting together scraps of dreams? She hunts down the most vivid details and links them in sequences that will let a reader see, smell, and hear a world that seems complete in itself; she builds a stage set and painstakingly hides all the struts and wires and nail holes, then stands back and hopes whoever might come to see it will believe.”
“A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.”
“(Rome) is a Metropolitan Museum of Art the size of Manhattan, no roof, no display cases, and half a million combustion engines rumbling in the hallways.”
“The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential - X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We'd pass out every time we saw - actually saw- a flower.”
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Book Keywords:
art, flower, journaling, writing, beauty, writing-craft, writing-process, spring
