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“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
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“What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.”
― Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
― Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
“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
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
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“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.
123 books
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46 friends
112 books
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11 friends
674 books
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498 friends
245 books
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6 friends
225 books
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38 friends
256 books
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10 friends
41 books
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10 friends
83 books
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5 friends
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Fiction and Non-fiction
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