1.
Beyond the terrace, a light breeze stirred the reeds at the edge of the pond. Looking out at this intimate vista, one could see the reeds and a stone lantern and the brightest of the evening's stars floating on the gloaming mirror of the pond. Then the breeze came again to crack the water's surface, and the picture was flooded.
John Burnham Schwartz
2.
A girl never can predict who might wander into her boudoir during a bubble bath.
John Burnham Schwartz
3.
Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks.
John Burnham Schwartz
4.
Men had suddenly become a scarce commodity, if not quite as sought after as rice.
John Burnham Schwartz
5.
The Jaguar's Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it.
John Burnham Schwartz
6.
Let me begin by saying that I am one of those naturally wary people who considers the verb return a kind of insidious threat.
John Burnham Schwartz
7.
There's no backward and no forward, no day other than this. You fill your cart as you go, and that's that.
John Burnham Schwartz
8.
I have long admired the visceral storytelling and moral complexity of John Vaillant’s brilliant non-fiction about humankind’s tragically ambivalent relationship with the natural world. Now he brings his abundant literary gifts to a debut novel set in a very real borderland in which human beings are themselves treated like animals. The Jaguar’s Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it.
John Burnham Schwartz
9.
Anyone who loved Tuesdays with Morrie should delight in reading The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Mitch Albom has populated his larger-than-life tale with memorable characters and filled it with the abundant warmth and wisdom that we've come to expect from this gifted storyteller.
John Burnham Schwartz
10.
Certain experiences you never forget, no matter how old you become.
John Burnham Schwartz
11.
It is one thing to recognise certain potentially useful affinities, and another to act on them.
John Burnham Schwartz