Thursday, March 5, 2015

Preparation for the Next Life Kindle Notes




Below are the highlights from my 2014 Reading List selection:

You have 11 highlighted passages

The steppe is filled with cheering. You have to imagine that great sound coming from thousands of us at one time, how it echoes out around the world. It makes the red and yellow poppies bloom everywhere on the green mountainsides and the rivers melt with admiration and flow from the snowcaps.
Read more at location 429

Zou Lei sees a woman in a conical straw hat with her hair divided into three black rivers, one down her back and one over either shoulder, hanging down to her waist. She is pushing a laundry cart with her bottles laid up pointing in opposite directions, the necks interlocking. The forked hair hangs like a ragged black shawl. A thin woman whose age is hard to tell without seeing her face, just the romance of her hair, as if she has prepared herself for a lover and was waiting years for him, a lifetime.
Read more at location 1546

Really, all the people must thank them or we would not be able to exist. When a farmer drives a truck filled with vegetables, the oil to run the motor is coming from the pipeline. I think if you are a woman in the market and you buy vegetables, you must thank my father. I don’t think anyone remembers this. Even I forget, but I shouldn’t. Everything comes from somewhere.
Read more at location 2225

No one said anything to her. She poured a full-sized Coca-Cola, no ice, and drank it straight down, gasping. Now that was good. The sugar flashed inside her like sunshine in the desert.
Read more at location 2586

Even high, they did not smile. Jimmy had not smiled for a year. The closest thing to smiling was a kind of short-term tolerance granted to the person talking to you. Then he lay down and covered himself with his sheet and lay like a sack of laundry.
Read more at location 3217

you? He finished his cigarette and went back to the mall. The mall was an office building that had been taken over by the Chinese. In its present state, everything had the half-finished, jerry-built appearance of transition from one thing to something else. There were cardboard shipping containers littered around the floor. Some units had bare concrete floors and raw cinder block walls, others had carpets and wall coverings and fluorescent lights. One room was being used to warehouse thousands of dried medicinal herbs, which were stored in a chaos of buckets, tubs, bins, bowls, cups, wooden drawers—containers of every description—anything that could be used to hold something else, even paper envelopes—none of it organized, all of it just lying there, while a twenty-year-old guy with a gold chain chewed wontons with his mouth open and watched a DVD. The sign over his head said Cohen’s Fashion Optical. You couldn’t tell what was old and what was new. You couldn’t tell whether something was coming or going. Things were in the middle of being built and destroyed at the same time. It was an environment he might have recognized.
Read more at location 3430

He blinked at her like somebody waking up and seeing the sun.
Read more at location 3485

He neared the Irish bar, where a guy in black urban combat gear—loose-fit denim, Timberlands, vest, and SWAT-style ball cap—had a chain wrapped around his knuckles, holding a tiger-striped pit bull on a leash. A big guy came striding around the corner with the energy of a man about to chop down an entire forest singlehandedly. He bounced up and down as if on springs, his long hair swinging back and forth, the plane of his face lifted displaying the short lines of his mouth and eyes. He was over six feet tall, weighed two-twenty. The beard on his face made him look like a 70s biker. Skinner was struck by an unusual detail: he was wearing a red bandana tied around his thigh. He entered the bar, handing off his lit cigarette to the pit bull’s owner, who took it without a word, presumably to hold for him until he returned.
Read more at location 4545

My mother was Muslim people, she said, chewing. I know about God, but it’s too many rules. No, no, no. You are wrong, he said. No, no, no. You make a big mistake to say that. Let me tell you something about God. He is like the shade of a tree on a hot day. How can I say? It is like you are burning in the sun and you feel very uncomfortable. You are thirsty and you would like some good things to drink. All you have to do is open this door and go in where it is cool and refreshing. That is God.
Read more at location 6016

But, he said, you cannot have these beautiful things if you lead a bad life, if you are sinning, doing what you want. Of course you must live properly and obey the law. He pointed at the bilingual Arabic and English sign over the mosque’s doorway, which he read aloud for her. It said Preparation For The Next Life.
Read more at location 6020

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