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Book: What is Stephen Harper Reading?: Yann Martel's Recommended Reading for a Prime Minister and Book Lovers of All Stripes
Quotes of Book: What is Stephen Harper
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  1. Yann Martel _ What is Stephen Harper

    We're all busy. Meditating monks in their cells are busy. That's adult life, filled to the ceiling with things that need doing. {It seems only children and the elderly aren't plagued by lack of time-and notice how they enjoy their books, how their lives fill their eyes.} But every person has a space next to where they sleep, whether a patch of pavement or a fine bedside table. In that space, at night, a book can glow. And in those moments of docile wakefulness, when we begin to let go of the day, then is the perfect time to pick up a book and be someone else, somewhere else, for a few minutes, a few pages, before we fall asleep.
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  2. Yann Martel _ What is Stephen Harper

    That is the greatness of literature, and its paradox, that in reading about fictional others we end up reading about ourselves. Sometimes this unwitting self-examination provokes smiles of recognition, while other times, . . . it provokes shudders of worry and denial. Either way, we are the wiser, we are existentially thicker.
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  3. Yann Martel _ What is Stephen Harper

    Art is water, and just as humans are always close to water, for reasons of necessity {to drink, to wash, to flush away, to grow} as well as for reasons of pleasure {to play in, to swim in, to relax in front of, to sail upon, to suck on frozen, coloured and sweetened}, so humans must always be close to art in all its incarnations, from the frivolous to the essential. Otherwise we dry up.
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  4. Yann Martel _ What is Stephen Harper

    On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, 'Gosh, life is racing by.' But that's not it at all, it's the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.
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  5. Yann Martel _ What is Stephen Harper

    You might have noticed that I have been sending you used books. I have done this not to save money, but to make a point which is that a used book, unlike a used car, hasn't lost any of its initial value. A good story rolls of the lot into the hands of its new reader as smoothly as the day it was written. And there's another reason for these used paperbacks that never cost much even when new; I like the idea of holding a book that someone else has held, of eyes running over lines that have already seen the light of other eyes. That, in one image, is the community of readers, is the communion of literature.
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  6. Yann Martel _ What is Stephen Harper

    Books, like people, can't be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.
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