vgriff

I was sitting in my local bookstore cafe this weekend and took a few minutes to browse my digital commonplace book. Here are a few quotes I added from books read this month:

We have a saying in Farsi. It translates ‘your place was empty.’ We say it when we miss somebody. Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram

I found myself split in a way that was deeply familiar—half of me so worried about William I could barely function, the other half drunk with joy at getting to be exactly where I was. I wanted to be large enough to contain the totality of both feelings. Did their coexistence automatically make me some kind of a monster? Could a person mourn and be joyful simultaneously? I understood it as the challenge of the twenty-first century. Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country by Pam Houston

A few days later my father came over, biting triangles off an oversize Toblerone bar. He didn’t usually eat chocolate. A gift, he said, from a woman he’d just started dating. “It’s mine,” he said, when I asked for a piece. Small Fry by Lisa Jobs (of her father, Steve. What. A. Dick.)