Discover new books on Goodreads
Meet your next favorite book
“If people are busy living out myths you don’t like, leave them to it.”
― Dhalgren
― Dhalgren
“But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.”
― Dhalgren
― Dhalgren
“they were nice in a useless sort of way, which is, after all, the only way to be truly nice.”
― Dhalgren
― Dhalgren
“The world did not have me in mind; it had no mind. It was a coincidental collection of things and people, of items, an I myself was one such item...the things in the world did not necessarily cause my overwhelming feelings; the feelings were inside me, beneath my skin, behind my ribs, withing my skull. They were even, to some extent, under my control.”
― An American Childhood
― An American Childhood
Kiersten’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Kiersten’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Polls voted on by Kiersten
Lists liked by Kiersten


























