2026 Reading Challenge

reoccurrence > reoccurrence's Quotes

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  • #1
    Samuel R. Delany
    “What's more, I was free to do anything that did not hurt others that strengthened me and helped me in the one thing that we are all put on this earth to do: help one another - because it is the only thing that, in the long run, gives us pleasure, as receiving love and friendship and affection is the only thing that gives us joy and ameliorates the dread of our inevitable extinction.”
    ― Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
    tags: affection, dread, earth, extinction, free, friendship, help, hurt, joy, love, pleasure
    15 likes

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  • #2
    Samuel R. Delany
    “Son, this whole town’s my personal urinal. Makes me feel like I own it, pissin’ all over the fuckin’ thing.”
    ― Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders: An Improbable Community
    2 likes

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  • #3
    Norman Mailer
    “In its true exchange, one cannot gain a great deal unless one is willing to dare losing all.”
    ― Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings
    tags: ancient-egypt, so-there, thats-right, the-santa-maria, who-goes-there, who-says, your-mama, your-papa
    3 likes

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  • #4
    Norman Mailer
    “I must purchase this eunuch from You," she said to Ptah-nem-hotep, Who smiled agreeably. "Are they not delightful?" He asked, and looked at the dark bodies of these five slaves with the same love I had seen my great-grandfather give to a team of matched horses or twin bulls, and indeed, since the slave wore nothing, one could see not only their plump and muscular haunches, but the shiny stump where their testicles had been and this gave them a nice resemblance to geldings.”
    ― Norman Mailer , Ancient Evenings
    tags: bull, eunuch, gelding, haunches, horses, slaves, testicles
    3 likes

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  • #5
    Robert Kirkman
    “I'm about as useful as a fingerless eunuch during Fuck Fest February! someone give me a gun!”
    ― Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead, Vol. 27: The Whisperer War
    tags: eunuch, february, fingering, fingerless, fuck-fest, negan
    8 likes

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  • #6
    Ronald Wright
    “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
    ― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress
    tags: american-dream, misattributed-to-john-steinbeck
    1302 likes

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  • #7
    Samuel R. Delany
    “To be sure, the Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom, even when it takes you through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Just watch out for parasites.”
    ― Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
    tags: life-experience
    9 likes

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  • #8
    Samuel R. Delany
    “The cycles of Eric’s life took in stony beaches and pine forests where you could walk in a daylight all but night dark and fields where there was no grass, only stones and moss, alongside tar and macadam measured at its edge with poles and wires and solar panels, and water, broken, flickering, so much water, as much water—salt and silver—as there was sky, enough to make you scream or laugh at such absurd vastness, swelling within until Eric became his self exploding through today toward tomorrow, water green as glass falling between rocks and wet grass, the smell of dust and docks and distances, and sometimes Shit stepped up and took Eric’s rough hand in his rough hand.”
    ― Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders
    4 likes

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  • #9
    Samuel R. Delany
    “Takin’ care of that boy is the only thing I’m here for in this sea beaten world . . .”
    ― Samuel R. Delany, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders: An Improbable Community
    2 likes

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  • #10
    George Gissing
    “It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.”
    ― George Gissing
    tags: relationships, thought
    68 likes

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  • #11
    Gene Wolfe
    “...I rejoiced in the flaws that made her more real to me”
    ― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
    36 likes

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  • #12
    Gene Wolfe
    “Men are said to desire women, Severian. Why do they despise the women they obtain?”
    ― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
    18 likes

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  • #13
    Gene Wolfe
    “We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard defining edges.”
    ― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
    tags: identity, symbol
    24 likes

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  • #14
    Gene Wolfe
    “All love that which they destroy.”
    ― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
    15 likes

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  • #15
    Gene Wolfe
    “I am deserving of no gifts."

    "That is so. But you must recall, Severian, that when a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but payment.”
    ― Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer
    tags: book-of-the-new-sun, deserving, gene-wolfe, generosity, gifts
    15 likes

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  • #16
    Arnold J. Toynbee
    “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
    ― Arnold Toynbee
    tags: cultural-decay
    143 likes

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  • #17
    Iain Reid
    “The tragedy of life isn't that the end comes. That's the gift. Without an end, there's nothing. There's no meaning. Do you see? A moment isn't a moment. A moment is an eternity. A moment should mean something. It should be everything.”
    ― Iain Reid, We Spread
    33 likes

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  • #18
    Iain Reid
    “I was never inspired by something whole. It was always a fragment, a crumb, a piece of a moment, a half-forgotten impression, one side of a person. Never fully formed because it could only be my view of a thing, not someone else’s.”
    ― Iain Reid, We Spread
    12 likes

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  • #19
    Plato
    “The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
    ― Plato, The Republic
    tags: government, inferiority, politics, rule
    1506 likes

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  • #20
    Plato
    “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
    ― Plato, The Republic
    tags: apology, knowing, nothing, paradox, plato, republic, socrates, socratic, wisdome
    1468 likes

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  • #21
    Plato
    “If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”
    ― Plato, The Republic
    tags: abilities, empowerment, equality, gender, instruction, jobs, men, skills, women, work
    820 likes

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  • #22
    Emily Brontë
    “Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”
    ― Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
    tags: love
    4463 likes

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  • #23
    Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
    “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
    ― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein
    tags: change, human
    5390 likes

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  • #24
    Lucy Ellmann
    “the fact that you’ll never know what sort of person you might have been if you’d read different stuff”
    ― Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport
    tags: books, cultural-influences, reading
    24 likes

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  • #25
    Lucy Ellmann
    “he fact that there seems to be no problem in America that can’t be solved by murdering your whole family or your boss or a whole crowd of strangers, and maybe yourself”
    ― Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport
    tags: homicide, problems, shootings, social-issues, suicide
    9 likes

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  • #26
    Lucy Ellmann
    “the fact that there are times, maybe the most unlikely times, that you realize you're simply thrilled to be alive, and what a great piece of luck it is just to be a part of things, to have a body, so you can feel and see and walk the earth, for just a little while”
    ― Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport
    10 likes

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  • #27
    Lucy Ellmann
    “dogs can be trained to predict their owners' epileptic fits, but not the other way around”
    ― Lucy Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport
    2 likes

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  • #28
    “I get to go to overseas places, like Canada.”
    ― Britney Spears
    tags: canada, geography
    103 likes

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  • #29
    Aristotle
    “The trouble with Goodreads is that they never authenticate these quotations of famous people.”
    ― Aristotle, Physics
    tags: plato, quotations, research
    12 likes



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affection
dread
earth
extinction
free
friendship
help
hurt
joy
love
pleasure
ancient-egypt
so-there
thats-right
the-santa-maria
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your-papa
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eunuch
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horses
slaves
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february
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fuck-fest
negan
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relationships
thought
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