Some of my tochstone moments

To Kill a Mockingbird spoke to me when I was a sophomore in high school, and I fell in love with literature. Then, when I did my paraprofessional experience, I taught the book to a sophomore class and I had the same experience again. This book is truly amazing.

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 11, spoken by the character Atticus

She seemed glad to see me when I appeared in the kitchen, and by watching her I began to think there was some skill involved in being a girl.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 12

The sixth grade seemed to please him from the beginning:  he went through a brief Egyptian Period that baffled me - he tried to walk flat a great deal, sticking one arm in front of him and one in back of him, putting one foot behind the other.  He declared Egyptians walked that way; I said if they did I didn't see how they got anything done, but Jem said they accomplished more than the Americans ever did, they invented toilet paper and perpetual embalming, and asked where would we be today if they hadn't?  Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.  ~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Chapter 7

The book that inspired me to get my degree in English Literature is Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Here is the touchstone quote that causes me .... I just cannot explain it...words cannot describe...but I need to find my book, first. I could say that the whole book is a touchstone.

He closed his eyes and thought of the black men in Shalimar, Roanoke, Petersburg, Newport News, Danville, in the Blood bank, on Darling Street, in the pool halls, the barbershops. Their names. Names they got from yearnings, gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weaknesses. Names that bore witness. Macon Dead. Sing Byrd, Crowell Byrd, Pilate, Reba, Hagar, Magdalene, First Corinthians, Milkman, Guitar, Railroad Tommy, Hospital Tommy, Empire State (he just stood around and swayed), Small Boy, Sweet, Circe, Moon, Nero, Humpty-Dumpty, blue Boy, Scandinavia, Quack-Quack, Jericho, Spoonbread, Ice Man, Dough Belly… (330) (Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon)

And then there is the book that inspired me at the end of my education to go further in my education and apply to grad school: Margrett Atwood's Alias Grace.

"It says there were two different trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge; but I believe there was only the one and that the Fruit of Life and the Fruit of Good and Evil were the same. And if you ate of it you would die, but if you didn't eat of it you would die also; although if you did eat of it, you would be less bone-ignorant by the time you got around to your death...Such an arrangement would appear to me more the way life is."
-Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

"But it's not easy being quiet and good, it's like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you've already fallen over; you don't seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength."-Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

"People dressed in a certain kind of clothing are never wrong. Also, they never fart."
-Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

  I am just putting some of my all-time favorite passages on here, and I see that I clearly pick poetry for the message. But it is the way that the message is given that is attractive to me. This last poem I love because of the way it sounds. When I first found this poem, it was a recording on a CD. After listening to it, I went out and bought the book of poetry.

 Tonight I Can Write by Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tries to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.