January, 2025
Climbing Parnassus – Tracy Lee Simmons
Some favorite quotes:
p.76 “The men whose words and ideas we remember best were citizens of a republic of letters. They had learned to think and speak and write with precision and flair. The tried not to say something new; they tried to say something worthy, and to say it perfectly.”
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p. 94 “And what could be more useful to the city than the virtuous citizen?”
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p. 165 “But as thinkers saw from ancient times till the day before yesterday, precision and grace are not a gift; they wait at the end of an arduous climb.
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p. 169 “Classically educated people are not the prime consumers of propaganda.”
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p. 199 “Americans view the Founding Fathers in vacuo, isolated from the soil that nurtured them.”
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p. 213 “Emerson once said, ‘that the adoption of the test what is it good for would abolish the rose and exalt in triumph the cabbage.’Â And man cannot live by cabbage alone.”
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p. 244 “The Humanist knows that one must scale mountains before feeling the elations of triumph, that one must fight battles before tasting the fruits of victory. He must cultivate within himself the habitual vision of greatness and the conscious ideal of human perfection. Nothing is given. All is earned. And the earning begins with he climbing…
January, 2025
My Man Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
Some favorite quotes:
“I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn’t come near the place if I hadn’t got to see editors occasionally. There’s a blight on it. It’s got moral delirium tremens. It’s the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!
I felt rather like Lot’s friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent.”
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“For the first time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish’s.”
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“He was fifty-one, and it seemed as if he might go to par.”
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“Bicky rocked like a jelly in a high wind.”
February 2025
Deep Work – Cal Newport
Some favorite quotes:
p. 31 If you can’t learn, you can’t thrive. To thrive you must be able to learn hard things and produce at an elite level…To learn requires intense concentration.”
p. 77 “Our brains construct our worldview based on what we pay attention to.”
p. 136 “Focus on the wildly important…The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.
p. 147 ” To concentrate you need directed attention. If you exhaust this finite resource, you struggle to concentrate…much like the theory of limited will power. Walking on busy streets takes up your directed attention, while walking through nature replenishes it.”
p. 157 “Efforts to deepen your focus will struggle if you don’t wean your mind from a dependence on distraction.”
p. 158 “People who multitask all the time can’t filter out irrelevancy…They’re chronically distracted.”
p. 161 “Instead of taking a break from distraction to focus, take a break from focus and schedule distraction…Schedule in advance when you’ll use the internet, then avoid it outside these times.
p. 219 “Deep work is exhausting and cannot be sustained for unlimited amounts of time…ex: a child is only capable of an hour of ‘deep work’ in a day…Adults are capable of about four hours.”
p. 221 “Schedule every minute of your day in blocks. This gives you intention of how you will use some time. Something more important can take over, but your day was not open to just anything.”
March 2025
The House of My Mother – Shari Franke
Some favorite quotes:
p. 45 “I don’t remember the exact moment when the cameras first started rolling. All I know is that one day, we were just a regular family, going about our lives; the next, there was a janky camera constantly pointed in our direction, documenting our every move for the consumption of strangers on the internet.”
p. 46 “We never chose to be internet celebrities. But that made no difference – soon, our lives now revolved around nonstop content creation – whether we liked it or not. Birthdays, barbecues, even lazy Sunday afternoons, – no moment was too mundane to escape documentation.”
p. 53 “Yes, Ruby’s drive was bringing in money for her family and validation for her ego. But none of those superficial rewards could fix what was broken inside her. Instead, they seemed to fuel a vicious cycle, pushing her to seek more validation, more views, more content – often at the expense of her family.
The most problematic element in our family dynamic – Ruby’s relentless ambition, fueled by a potent mixture of unresolved pain and narcissism – had become the driving force of our existence. It was as if we had taken the most poisonous plant in our garden and, instead of uprooting it, make it the centerpiece of our lives.”
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