Armchair Books, Edinburgh, Scotland (photo by Fergus Ray Murray)
“The Story of My Life” by Helen Keller. An American classic rediscovered by each generation, The Story of My Life is Helen Keller’s account of her triumph over deafness and blindness. Popularized by the stage play and movie The Miracle Worker, Keller’s story has become a symbol of hope for people all over the world.
This book–published when Keller was only twenty-two–portrays the wild child who is locked in the dark and silent prison of her own body. With an extraordinary immediacy, Keller reveals her frustrations and rage, and takes the reader on the unforgettable journey of her education and breakthroughs into the world of communication. From the moment Keller recognizes the word “water” when her teacher finger-spells the letters, we share her triumph as “that living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!” An unparalleled chronicle of courage, The Story of My Life remains startlingly fresh and vital more than a century after its first publication, a timeless testament to an indomitable will.
Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play… I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.
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| — | Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (via bookmania) |
Things we lose have a way of coming back to us in the end, if not always in the way we expect.
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| — | J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (via bookmania) |
Love, by its laws, desires us to enjoy a happiness that never ends.
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| — | from Alejo Carpentier’s novel, The Kingdom in This World (via afilmandlitlover) |
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