“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
― The White Album
― The White Album
“I could indulge here in a little idle generalization, could lay off my own state of profound emotional shock on the larger cultural breakdown, could talk fast about convulsions in the society and alienation and anomie and maybe even assassination, but that would just be one more stylish shell game. I am not a society in microcosm. I am a thirty-four-year old woman with long straight hair and an old bikini bathing suit and bad nerves sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific waiting for a tidal wave that will not come.”
― The White Album
― The White Album
“To be kin to a dragon, you must not only have a soul of water. You must have the blood of the sea, and the sea is not always pure. It is not any one thing. There is darkness in it, and danger, and cruelty. It can raze great cities with its rage. Its depths are unknowable; they do not see the touch of the sun. To be a Miduchi is not to be pure, Tané. It is to be the living sea. That is why I chose you. You have a dragon’s heart.”
― The Priory of the Orange Tree
― The Priory of the Orange Tree
“(About Georgia O'Keeffe:) 'The city men.' 'The men.' 'They.' The words crop up again and again as this astonishingly aggressive woman tells us what was on her mind when she was making her astonishingly aggressive paintings. It was those city men who stood accused of sentimentalizing her flowers: "I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see - and I don't.”
― The White Album: Essays
― The White Album: Essays
“I could bend you with my finger and my thumb. A mere reed you feel in my hands. But whatever I do with this cage, I cannot get at you, and it is your soul that I want.”
― Jane Eyre
― Jane Eyre
Meredith’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Meredith’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Meredith
Lists liked by Meredith



























