“there are words that cover up the world.”
― Tender Is the Flesh
― Tender Is the Flesh
“When I looked around, I saw and heard of none like me. Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?”
―
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“Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable.”
― On Being Ill
― On Being Ill
“She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.”
― The Marriage Plot
― The Marriage Plot
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, "This is what it is to be happy.”
― The Bell Jar
― The Bell Jar
Emily’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Emily’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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