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The Book of Qualities
by J. Ruth Gendler
Excitement wears orange socks.
Despair papered her bathroom walls with newspaper articles about acid rain.
Joy drinks pure water.
The Book of Qualities presents 74 qualities--including
Pleasure, Anger, Terror, Beauty, and Change as everyday characters who live
among us. Both personal and impersonal, the Qualities convey a variety of
human emotions in a simple and entertaining manner; readers are inspired
to reflect on their own qualities and communicate their feelings with new
clarity.
About the Qualities
When I was a little girl, I made up a story about the store where they sell Qualities.
More like a trading post or library than a department store or supermarket, we could go to the
store where they sell Qualities to taste, try on, and sample various qualities. From time to time
as a teenager I made notes about the factory where they manufacture facts and the image warehouse
where they store belief systems.
As I committed myself more seriously to writing Qualities, I began to consider the limits of
emotional language. We often assume we know the dimensions of an emotional quality and whether
it is good or bad without taking the time to see where the quality can take us and what it can teach us.
During the process of writing The Book of Qualities I felt like an explorer trying to penetrate
underneath the layers and stereotypes to experience the Qualities more directly. I was turning my
skills in investigation and observation inward, focusing on the textures and colors of the emotional
landscape, calling on my training as both a journalist and an artist.
The Qualities seem to exist in a community of their own, apart from us, and simultaneously, they are
very familiar, a part of our everyday world. I imagine that the Qualities live together in a town--Courage
lives on the same block as Fear. Faith and Doubt are in the same apartment building; Despair hangs out in
the basement. However, I don't want to emphasize the Town of Qualities too much because it implies that the
Qualities are separate from us, and they seem to be both in and around us. Reading the Qualities aloud
brings them to life; even the same Qualities change subtly in response to the moods and needs of the
people listening.
The Qualities continue to open doors in several directions at once. I am interested in the difference between
similar Qualities such as Joy and Ecstasy, Contentment and Pleasure and the relationships between seeming
opposites like Certainty and Confusion, Beauty and Ugliness.
What happens when Courage and Simplicity work on a project together, when Pleasure and Sufficiency take a walk?
Somewhere around the New Year I choose a Quality for the year and then pick one out of a bowl of Qualities,
walking between the one I choose and the one that chose me. Each Quality has its own challenges and gifts.
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Sample Pages
Click on the following images to view the sample pages.
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How to Buy The Book of Qualities
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You can also buy directly from Turquoise Mountain Publishing:
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