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“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”
― The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire
― The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire
“Listen, I have been educated.
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
What the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.”
―
I have learned about Western
Civilization. Do you know
What the message of Western
Civilization is? I am alone.”
―
“To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”
― The Fire Next Time
― The Fire Next Time
“When I was nine years old, the world, too, was nine years old. At least, there was no difference between us, no opposition, no distance. We just tumbled around from sunrise to sunset, earth and body as alike as two pennies. And there was never a harsh word between us, for the simple reason that there were no words at all between us; we never uttered a word to each other, the world and I. Our relationship was beyond language—and thus also beyond time. We were one big space (which was, of course, a very small space).”
― The Condition of Secrecy
― The Condition of Secrecy
“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”
― The Fire Next Time
― The Fire Next Time
⊹⊹⊹gw’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at ⊹⊹⊹gw’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
271 books
|
33 friends
247 books
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6 friends
238 books
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6 friends
34 books
|
8 friends
656 books
|
499 friends
641 books
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45 friends
79 books
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4 friends
139 books
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7 friends
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Fiction and Non-fiction
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