r.b.

“I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“What do we do with those that can be accessed and dismissed by a channel changer, that we love no less than a nineteenth-century poet or an admired stranger or a character from the pen of Emily Brontë? What do we do when one of them commingles with our own sense of self, only to be transferred into a finite space within an on-demand portal?”
― Patti Smith, M Train

“Some people are beams of light in this world. Some are shadows. They don't always feel like they belong, or don't know how, so they stand in the back of the crowd, out of sight and off to the edge somewhere.”
― David Sayre

“Her word had no weight; her convenience was always to give way.”
― Jane Austen, Persuasion