A few 5 Star Reviews

The last time I wrote down a few (more than a few) quotes from books I had read was nearly a year ago.  So, this might be a long list (for those of you who read posts without pictures -it's okay, I won't judge).  

The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida 

I really wanted to like this one.  And, I did.  I just am not sure how true it is, but it seems true.  It's 'written' or transcribed from an Autistic boy.  I've worked with dozens of people with autism, and it all seemed to make sense, it just surprises me how verbal this young man is.  

14

You must be thinking: "is he never going to learn?" We know we're making you sad and upset, but it's as if we don't have any say in it.  I'm afraid, and that's the way it is.  But please, whatever you do, don't give up on us.  We need your help.  

15 

True compassion is about not bruising the other person's self respect.  

29

A person who's looking at a mountain far away doesn't notice the prettiness of a dandelion in front of them.  A person who's looking at a dandelion in front of them doesn't see the beauty of a mountain far away. 

45

...I've learned that every human being, with or without disabilities, needs to strive to do their best, and by striving for happiness you will arrive at happiness.  

47

But when I'm jumping, it's as if my feelings are going upward to the sky.  Really, my urge to be swallowed up by the sky is enough to make my heart quiver.  

56

Normal people think we're highly dependent and can't live without ongoing support, but in fact there are times when we're stoic heroes.  

90

All human beings have their hardships to bear, so never swerve away from the path you're on (Buddha?) Everybody has a heart that can be touched by something.

Conversations with myself by Nelson Mandela

 

This one was a little hard to get though, only because it didn't follow a narrative or anything.  It's a compilation of interviews, journals, other published articles from his life.  It was, not surprisingly, full of quotes I wanted to remember though

 xi Mandela made it clear that we did not have to accept the world as it is -that we could do our part to seek the world as it should be (President Obama)

xiii

...I am reminded that underneath the history that has been made, there is a human being who chose hope over fear -progress over the prisons of the past. (President Obama)

24

Don't run away from your problems; face them! Because if you don't deal with them, they will always be with you.  Deal with a problem which arises; face it courageously.

35

Only armchair politicians are immune from committing mistakes.  Errors are inherent in political action. 

61

Home is home even for those who aspire to serve wider interests and who have established their home of choice in distant regions.  

62

I have often wondered whether a person is justified in neglecting his own family to fight for the opportunities of others. 

81

Whether you have to use peaceful methods or violent methods...is determined purely by the conditions ...Christ used force because in that situation it is the only language that he could use.  

142

We would prefer that the community should convey its disapproval of his policies without using methods like assassination.  Because that can leave scars which we would find it difficult to remove for generations to remove for generations to come.  

182

Spiritual weapons can be dynamic and often have an impact difficult to appreciate except in the light of actual experience in given situations.  In a way they make prisoners free men, turn commoners into monarchs and dirt into pure gold... It is only my flesh and blood that are shut up behind these tight walls... In my thoughts I am free as a falcon.

183

Physical suffering is nothing compared to the trampling down of those tender bonds of affection that from the basis of the institution of marriage and the family that unite man and wife.

184

 There will always be good men on the earth, in all countries, and even here at home.  

192

Let us forget the past, and think of the present. 

212

Never forget that a saint is a sinner who keeps trying. 

231

But a good pen can also remind us of the happiest moments in our lives, bring noble ideas into our dens, our blood and our souls.  It can turn tragedy into hope and victory.  

262

You have to recognize that people are produced by the mud in the society in which you live and that therefore they are human beings.  They have got good points, they have got weak points.  Your duty is to work with human beings as human beings, not because you think they are angels.  

402

...there are good men and women in all communities... a true leader must work hard to ease tensions, especially when dealing with sensitive and complicated issues.  Extremists normally thrive when there is tension, and pure emotion tends to super cede rational thinking.  A real leader uses every issue, not matter how serious and sensitive, to ensure that at the end of the debate we should emerge stronger and more united than ever before... compromise is the only alternative for those who seriously want peace and stability.  

406

There is universal respect and even admiration for those who are humble and simple by nature, and who have absolute confidence in all human beings irrespective of their social status.  

410

On issue that deeply worried me in prison was the false image that i unwittingly projected to the outside world; of being regarded as a saint.  I never was one, even in the basis of an earthly definition of a saint as a sinner who keeps trying.  

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri

I liked this one, I don't remember too many specifics about it.  But, I like reading about different cultures, this one is set mostly in Calcutta.  

43

War will bring the revolution; revolution will stop the war 

127

But even as she was going through with it she knew that it was useless. just as it was useless to save a single earing when the other half of the pair was lost. 

Insurgent by Veronica Roth

This is book #2 in a dystopian trilogy that is ever so popular these days.  I liked the series, took an interesting turn near the end and I actually liked how it ended.  

107

Noise and activity are the refuges of the bereaved and the guilty. 

377

Grief is not as heavy as guilt, but it takes more away from you.  

518

Sometimes the people you oppress become mightier than you would like.  

Allegiant by Veronica Roth 

This was my least favorite of the three, not because of how it ended but the story get's a little complicated and convoluted.  

372

I used to think that when people fell in love, they just landed where they landed. and they had no choice in the matter afterward... I fell in love with him.  But I don't just stay with him by default as if there's no one else available to me.  I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other.  I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.  

 

446

Or maybe forgiveness is just the continual pushing aside of bitter memories, until time dulls the hurt and the anger, and the wrong is forgotten.  

Looking for Alaska by John Green  

I LOVED this one!!! It's by the same author as The Fault in our Stars, which I also liked, but I prefer this one.  It's a coming of age, kids in love, boarding school tale.  But, it's just... I don't know.  I'm surprised I didn't write more down from this one, but I think I was just enjoying reading it too much.  Because I remember thinking I could have written down half the book.  

7

"I love you", they both blurted out simultaneously.  It needed to be said, but the words made the whole thing horribly uncomfortable, like watching your grandparents kiss.  

22

You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can't say that Alabamians as a people are unduly afraid of deep fryers.  

Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

This one was mentioned a few times during our Returning Warriors workshop and it sounded familiar to me.  It's kind of one of those books that you should just read at least once in your life.  Viktor Frankl was a Nazi camp survivor.  But he was also a psychoanalyst of sorts, so his book and theories about people were quite interesting and unique, and I've read a lot about Holocaust survivors.  

We have come to know Man as he really is.  After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lords Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.  

Don't aim at success-the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.  For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued, it must ensue.  

18

Yes a man can get used to anything, but don't ask us how. 

20

An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.  

37

The salvation of man is through love and in love.  

43

Humor was another of the souls weapons in the fight for self preservation.  It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds  

44

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of trick learned while mastering the art of living.  Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.  

[Analogy of suffering behaving like a gas, filling whatever chamber is present] Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious of mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little.  Therefore the 'size' of human suffering is absolutely relative.  It also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys.  

66

...everything can be taken from a man but on thing; the last of the human freedoms -to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.  

67

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.  Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death.  Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.  

70

With the end of uncertainty there came the uncertainty of the end... the Latin word finis has two meanings: the end or the finish, and a goal to reach.  A man who could not see the end of his 'provisional existence' (life in a concentration camp) was not able to see an ultimate goal in life.  

76

Nietzsche's words, "He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how"

77

It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.  Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to full the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.  

78

But there was not need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.  

79

[Talking about preventing suicides of men who felt they had nothing more to expect from life] It was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.  

86

Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. ...From this we may learn there are two races of men in the world. but only these two -the 'race' of the decent man and the 'race' of the indecent man.  Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society.  No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people.  In this sense, no group is of 'pure race' -and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.  

113

In some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.  

146

Even the helpless victim of a hopeless situation, facing a fate he cannot change, may rise above himself, may grow beyond himself and by so doing change himself.  

154

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of.  And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.  

164

The world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. 

165

The meaning of life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.  

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides 

This one was... a bit strange and really long.  I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to anyone.  It was interesting and I didn't not like it, it just took a while to get through.  

173

Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players. permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup?

298

All of the sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore.  It was about the mayflower and Plymouth Rock.  It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything since.  Instead of everything that was happening now!

418

...the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.   

Inferno by Dan Brown 

I don't love his books as much as the masses, and this one wasn't one of his best, in my opinion either.  As usual, if you know anything about art history (or Italy in this case) it might appeal to you a bit more than it did to me.  

214

Denial is a critical part of the human coping mechanism.  Without it, we would all wake up terrified every morning about all the ways we could die.  

218

Robert, what do you think soldiers do when they go to war? They kill innocent people and risk their death.  Anything is possible when people believe in a cause.

382

The masses are made up of individuals. 

386

In the sixties, the Russians built an entire fake spy network that dead-dropped bad intel that the British accepted for years.  In 1947, the US Air Force manufactured an elaborate UFO hoax to divert attention from a classified plane crash in Roswell, New Mexico.  And more recently. the world had been led to believe that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. 

  

Me Before You  by Jojo Moyes

Okay... I LOVED this one.  It was a book club pick and it turns out a lady in my ward had told me about it a while ago too.  This one was so real, and funny, (and sad).  It was just a tad predictable near the end, but you still hung on a sliver of hope it might turn out different than it did.  Raised some interesting questions, but mostly it was just a really fun read.  The main character is written so well, and her family are just as witty as she is.  

25

In our street 'posh' could mean anyone who didn't have a family member is possession of an antisocial behavior disorder. 

110

It's just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that is not the grown man -the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring -you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life.  You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.  

194

You only get one life.  It's actually your duty to live it has fully as possible.  

205

I will never, ever regret the things I've done.  Because most days, if you're stuck in one of these, all you have are the places in your memory that you can go to.  

325

I can't be the kind of man who just... accepts.  

355

It's not my choice.  It's not the choice of most of us on this board.  I love my life, even if I wish it was different.  But I understand why your friend might well have had enough.  It's tiring, leading this life, tiring in a way the AB [Able Bodied] can never truly understand.  If he is determined, if he really can't see a way of things being better for him, then I guess the best thing you can do is just be there.  You don't have to think he's right.  But you do have to be there. 

The Martian by Andy Weir

I was quite surprised at how much I liked this one too.  It's sort of sci fi, but really about one guy trying to stay alive and fix stuff.  And it's funny.  Justin kept asking me what was so funny when I was laughing.  

Last page

But really, the did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out.  It might not seem that way sometimes, but it's true.  If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search.  If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood.  If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies.  This is so fundamentally human that it's found in every culture without exception.  Yes, there are assholes who don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do.