:: word gathering ~ The Great Books ::

" I believe a work of art is primarily concerned

with the creation of beauty,

whether through words, colors, shapes, sounds, or movement.

But it is impossible to read serious novels, poetry, essays, and biographies

without also growing convinced

that they gradually enlarge our minds,

refine our spirits,

make us more sensitive and understanding.

They are instruments of self-exploration."

{Michael Dirda}

~ engagement with ideas

~ the reader, re-invigorated, re-inspired, and restored to the life of the mind

~ heart-stopping beauty

~ soul making

~ enlargement of imaginative sympathy

~ necessary component to strength

~ momentous great stories and ideas I consumed with such hunger

~ of solitude and rapture

~ filled with longing & curiosity

~ lively adventure of the mind

~ fall into rapt admiration

~ ideas insinuated into corners

~ expansion of feeling

~ promise of enlargement

~ adventure of strangeness

~ wonderful ritual of the bookstore

~ trust the initial charge of feeling

~ intellectual atmosphere

~ readiness to be filled with something

~ hum of contentment

~ raw appetite for print between the covers

~ widening pleasure that warmed me like sunshine

~ everything abundant and splendid

~ flows in overwhelming waves

~ sweetness of life

~ shining & impenetrable

~ desperate bursts of reading

~ the hum of pleasure

~ tiny sensations of well-being

~ you create a self, you don't inherit it

~ longed to submit myself to something larger

~ silvery whirls of the deep running river

~ fruit of a writers desire and a readers pleasure

~ fall into a novel for hours

~ poems amoral magnificence

~ sparrows, dense-winged, spiraling above

{ words gathered from : Great Books by Anthony O'Hear}