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"i last read this eleven years ago, in spring of 2013, and decided that I hated jane austen’s writing, it was boring and opaque and overly flowery and the characters were indistinguishable from one another. coming to realise that i’m genuinely enjoying reading it second time around was a shock and also proof that my brain hadn’t fully developed if i thought this was a really difficult read" — Apr 25, 2024 01:44PM
"i last read this eleven years ago, in spring of 2013, and decided that I hated jane austen’s writing, it was boring and opaque and overly flowery and the characters were indistinguishable from one another. coming to realise that i’m genuinely enjoying reading it second time around was a shock and also proof that my brain hadn’t fully developed if i thought this was a really difficult read" — Apr 25, 2024 01:44PM
“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.”
― American Gods
― American Gods
“It’s a very American illness, the idea of giving yourself away entirely to the idea of working in order to achieve some sort of brass ring that usually involves people feeling some way about you – I mean, people wonder why we walk around feeling alienated and lonely and stressed out.”
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“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”
― Infinite Jest
― Infinite Jest
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
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“There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.”
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caitlin’s 2025 Year in Books
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