My Commonplace Book... Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto

 Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto is a book that is on the, 1001 books to read before you die, list that I am reading. I rated it three (3) stars. It was short, and interesting but it took me a while to read it. It could not keep my attention. I did find some quotes from it that I really liked.

30% of ebook

As I grow older, much older, I will experience many things, and I will hit rock bottom again, and again. Again, and again I will suffer; again, and again I will get back on my feet. I will not be defeated. I won’t let my spirit be destroyed.

 33% of ebook

From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up  on living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I would go on living in the midst of the gloomy depression, and that made me feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I walked the night path calmly.

41% of ebook

No matter what, I want to continue living with the awareness that I will die. Without that, I am not alive.

Inching one’s way along a steep cliff in the dark: on reaching the highway, one breathes a sigh of relief. Just when one can’t take any more, one sees the moonlight. Beauty that seems to infuse itself, into the heart: I know about that.

My Commonplace Book... The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

 

"Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."

Tagore modernized Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced), and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla." - Goodreads Author Page

"...the element of devotion in woman's love is not like a hackneyed passage quoted from a romantic poem to be piously written down in round hand in a schoolgirl's copy-book.

They are cowards who claim absolute devotion from their wives as their right; that is a humiliation for both." - Location 104 of 3086 Kindle edition