198 books
—
213 voters
“There was a cliché about teaching: Once a teacher, always a teacher. But there was truth to it. Your sense of responsibility to your students never leaves you. You wonder about the different paths they might have taken. You wonder if you failed them.”
―
―
“It’s the creative life force in the moment that makes the work endure.” She pursed her lips. “All this thinking about posterity—it’s so typically male, don’t you think?—this preoccupation with end product, with legacy? What is history anyway but a bunch of penises on parade?”
― The Fetishist
― The Fetishist
“To know a person as a student is to know him always as a student: to sense deeply his striving and in his striving to sense your own. It is to watch, and then have difficulty forgetting, a student wrench himself into shape, like a character from Ovid, his body twisting and contorting, from one creature to another, submitting finally, to the task of a full transformation. Why? Because he trusts you; because the feel of this newer self; because he hopes you can make this change last.”
―
―
“You could record a performance, as they were going to do in Rome at the end of the tour, but you could never reproduce the currency of the moment in which a performance pulsed and breathed. This was divine, the closest Alma had come, beyond even sex, which was more an emptying out than a pouring in, a draining of self rather than a merging.”
― The Fetishist
― The Fetishist
“The cliché, that I'd gotten out of it more than I'd given, was true. What I had now was a metric for judging what a meaningful day might look like. The metric was this: Could you form a live, difficult connection with a person from entirely different circumstances? A connection so genuine that you forgot that you were even attempting to make one? So urgent that you wanted to show up the next day and that person believed you would?”
―
―
meghan’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at meghan’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by meghan
Lists liked by meghan



























