Q
U
I
E
T
Eleanor Ashgrove
Essays · Nationwide Bestseller
What I Mean When I Say Quiet
Twelve essays written over a decade, gathered for the first time — on noise and attention, ambition and enough, friendship, grief, and the examined ordinary day.
About This Book
Quiet, in these pages, is not silence and not retreat. It is the discipline of choosing what gets through — the closed door that makes work possible, the unscheduled hour that makes a friendship real, the grief honored instead of managed.
Moving from a harbor cottage to a city newsroom to a mountain cabin with no reception, these essays map a decade of learning to listen. With a new introduction on why quiet is not the absence of a life but its condition, this is the book readers press into each other's hands.
Inside
- 1. In Praise of the Closed Door
- 2. Enough: A Field Guide
- 3. The Unscheduled Hour
- 4. Grief, Unhurried
- 5. Eight more essays, plus a new introduction
An Excerpt
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity, and we spend it like small change at a toll booth — a glance here, a scroll there — then wonder why the road never ends. Quiet is how we start paying on purpose.”
— From “In Praise of the Closed Door”
Details
- Genre
- Essays / memoir
- Published
- 2015 · Ashgrove Letters
- Pages
- 264
- Formats
- Hardcover, ebook, audiobook
What Readers Say
“I have given this book six times. I intend to keep giving it until everyone I know has read the essay on grief.”
— Reader letter
“A landmark collection. Ashgrove gives the ordinary day its full moral weight.”
— Meridian Books Weekly