Potassium

Potassium’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (0)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (875)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
graphic-novels-or-comics‎ (274)
young-adult‎ (229)
autobiography-memoir‎ (153)
black-history-month‎ (127)
kick-ass-ladies‎ (124)
good-high-school-girl-books‎ (110)

shame‎ (82)
magic-realism‎ (61)
picture-books‎ (57)
historical-fiction‎ (53)
dystopia‎ (52)
translated-into-english‎ (43)
essays‎ (39)
poetry‎ (38)
small-town-suburban-malaise‎ (37)
delightfully-creepy‎ (31)

short-stories‎ (25)
sisters‎ (22)
school‎ (20)
spiritual‎ (19)
word-nerd‎ (17)
patrick-ness‎ (16)
books-scientists-should-read‎ (14)
sharks‎ (14)
epic-reads-that-are-worth-it‎ (13)
plays‎ (11)

things-people-apparently-like‎ (9)
a-s-king‎ (8)
book-club‎ (7)
murder-mysteries‎ (6)
photography‎ (6)
r-f-kuang‎ (6)
neal-stephenson‎ (5)
garth-stein‎ (4)
choose-your-own-adventure‎ (1)

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“Poor, unhappy Erik! Shall we pity him? Shall we curse him? He asked only to be 'some one,' like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must need pity the Opera ghost...”
― Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

318 likes

“I had read them and congratulated myself for being black, as if I had chosen to be, because black women were feminists before there was a name for it.”
― Carleen Brice, Orange Mint and Honey

4 likes

“He didn't know of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight, and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

58 likes

“Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another's experience from their perspective, not as we imagine we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it.

Empathy is no substitute for the experience itself. We don't get to tell a person with a broken leg or a bullet wound that they are not in pain. And people who have hit the caste lottery are not in a position to tell a person who has suffered under the tyranny of caste what is offensive or hurtful or demeaning to those at the bottom. The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least that a person in the dominant caste can do is not make the pain any worse.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

147 likes

“What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

420 likes

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