I started this habit when Stephen and Misty began returning books to me with little removable flags, like Post-It notes but smaller, affixed to the margins of pages. What a great way to remember something that caught my eye, I thought.Months later, I stumbled across a set of the flags and promptly purchased them, stashing a dispenser or two in the rooms that I typically read in. As I read, I occasionally get transfixed by a phrase, a paragraph, but can never find the page after the book finishes unspooling itself unless I keep a dispenser of little flags handy, a little notation of something special, something remembered.

I've been reading a lot lately, mostly because books don't care if I'm too tired or grubby to be presentable or thoughtful. As cats to petting, so are books to reading; they just want their spines tickled and maybe their pages rubbed a little.

From Bill Buford's Heat, page 198, on the evocative nature of great food:

"But often I wonder what Betta would think, and, like that, I'm back in that valley with its broken-combed mountain tops and the wolves at night and the ever-present feeling that the world is so much bigger than you, and my mind becomes a jumble of associations, of aunts and a round table and laughter you can't hear anymore, and I am overcome by a feeling of loss. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that's handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality."