Miguel Malave's Reading Interests

Renditions Of My Readings

The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells [1898]

- The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses.

On Seeing England for the First Time by Jamica Kincaid,

- The space between the idea of something and its reality is always wide and deep and dark. The longer they are kept apart - idea of thing, reality of thing- the wider the width, the deeper the depth, the thicker and darker the darkness. This space starts out empty, there is nothing in it, but it rapidly becomes filled up with obsession or desire or hatred or love-sometimes all of these things, sometimes some of these things, sometimes only one of these things.

Salt by Earl Lovelace,

- When a people begin to curse their elders, the next step they take is to curse their gods.

Paradise Lost - Book I, by John Milton,

- One who brings

A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n

Paradise Lost - Book II, by John Milton,

Besides what hope the never-ending flight

Of future days may bring, what chance, what change,

Worth waiting, since our present lot appears

For happy though but ill, for ill not worst,

If we procure not to ourselves more woe.

Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, by John Milton,

"And from that time forward the law of civil defensive war differs nothing from the law of forerign hostility. Nor is it distance of place that makes enmity, but enmity that makes distance. He, therefore, that keeps peace with me, near or remote, of whatsoever nation, is to me, as far as all civil and human offices, an Englishman and a neighbor. But if an Englishman, forgetting all laws, human, civil, and religious, offend against life and liberty, to him offended and to the law in his behalf, though born in the same womb, he is no better than a Turk, a Saracen, a heathen."

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad,

"She struck me as beautiful--I mean she had a beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight can be made to lie too, yet one felt that no manipulation of light and pose could have conveyed the delicate shade of truthfulness upon those features."

The Intended by David Dabydeen,

"Shaz intrepreted his new mood privately to me as the curse of the black race. According to him, when black's can't make it, they give totally and adopt a religion of being nothing, knowing nothing, doing nothing. They become believers in the after-life, instead of the here and now. They start talking about values and morals, quality instead of quantity. What it meant was hanging around street corners smoking dope or going on protest marches to preserve their dignity instead of going out looking for work. Or else they would riot and burn the place down, using their blackness as the coal to feed flames. Burn, burn, burn, that's all they secretly wanted to do. No wonder Joseph was fascinated by the wind, because it was the wind that spread fires."

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad,

"The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires."

On Nature by Lucretius,

"If things were made from nothing, any kind could spring from any source, and none would need a seed. In the first place, men would come from the sea, and the scaly fish from the land; birds would be hatched from the open sky; cattle and other domestic animals, and wild beasts of every kind, would occupy farmland and widlerness alike if birth were bound by no rule. The fruits upon the trees would not remain the same but would be changed, and any tree might bear any fruit. Indeed, if each thing had not its specific life-giving bodies, in what way could the source from which each comes be limited? But since each kind is in fact produced from specific seeds, each is born and comes forth into the shores of light from that place where its own matter and its own first seeds are present. Therefore all things cannot be born from all, fro the reason that separate and distinct powers exist in particular things."