1,019 books
—
909 voters
Karena Bakas
https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/kebakas
Sebald showed me that we live in all times and places at once. His central preoccupation was a kind of physics, an attempt to define and describe what he called “the laws governing the return of the past.” The past is all in there, all the
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“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.
And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”
― The Bluest Eye
And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”
― The Bluest Eye
“But whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.”
― The Argonauts
― The Argonauts
“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”
― The Bluest Eye
― The Bluest Eye
“The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you.”
― The Argonauts
― The Argonauts
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second's encounter with God and with eternity.”
― The Alchemist
― The Alchemist
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Karena’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Karena’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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