“Packing up. The nagging worry of departure. When shutting drawers and flinging wide an hotel wardrobe, or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa, I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof, yet we leave something of ourselves behind. Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood. This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.”
― Rebecca
― Rebecca
“Book! You lie there; the fact is, you books must know your places. You'll do to give us the bare words and facts, but we come in to supply the thoughts.”
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
“However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more's the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and to be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.”
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
“While we might say that we have fallen in love or developed a crush on someone unsuitable, the Greeks tended to externalize the causes of such experiences. We fall in love, they were struck by an arrow shot by the god Eros, for example. A sophisticated language of psychology simply didn’t exist at the time that Euripides was writing, so things which are internalized for us were often launched upon a Greek from without.”
― Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths
― Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths
“Here some one thrust these cards into these old hands of mine, swears that I must play them, and no others. And damn me, Ahab, but thou actest right, live in the game, and die in it.”
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Jesse’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Jesse’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Jesse
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