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Shaun Cox

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[Frantumaglia] [Author: Elena Ferrante] [November, 2016]

by Elena Ferrante

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Shaun’s Notes & Highlights

Dune (Dune, #1) by Frank Patrick Herbert

1 note & 2 highlights

“The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows—a wall against the wind. This is the willow’s purpose.”

One of the many themes in Dune that I love seeing demonstrated through the narrative over and over is how powerful subtlety and patience can be.

Joe Tobias and 2 other people liked this

“But imagine then, my little one, a state of being truly lonely, in which you don’t know anyone, don’t talk to anyone, and where nobody sees you, they merely look away. Such absolute loneliness would be impossible to live in, for why would one go on living at all? Everything within us is directed towards others. Language is directed towards others, and with it our thoughts, and with them, as the innermost existential truth, also the self. As long as the self exists in a space where there are others, even if only in the form of a voice on the radio, a face on TV, a narrator in a book, there is meaning, it can lead a meaningful life. But because the self is structured as an address to someone else, if it is deprived of others it can only be maintained by the will, and since the will of the self is merely the will for there to be others, sooner or later, if not even the slightest hope remains, the self will be extinguished.”
― Karl Ove Knausgård, Spring

1 likes

“Language doesn't fit onto reality like a toy fitting into a slot. Reality is actually one thing and language something else.”
― Sally Rooney

tags: intermezzo

1 likes

“The most distressing thing about Bridget’s attitude to Margaret, and especially towards her marriage, is not the belief the Bridget is being cruel, so much as the suspicion, bred in the bone, a lifelong instinct, but after all she might be right. Can the deep childhood impulse to trust one’s mother, to agree with her against oneself, ever be wrestled down by the comparatively thin force of reasoned argument? Are there even reasoned arguments to be made in matters of love, marriage, intimate life?”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

8 likes

“But I will tell you Squire that having read even a few dozen books in common is a force more binding than blood.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

74 likes

“Nuala, on the other hand, exerts influence over her husband and children primarily through a tendency to become irrationally anxious and ‘upset’. Much of the family life has therefore always been arranged around their collective efforts to prevent Nuala from becoming ‘upset’, which involves concealing from her, by almost any means necessary, the existence of any problems or potential conflicts within the family circle. Nuala lives, to some degree, in a fictitious world acted out for her by a special dramatic troupe consisting of her own children and husband, a world in which none of her loved ones have ever been unhappy, sick, depressed, disappointed, hurt, anxious or frightened. But this, in Anna’s view, has also had the perverse effect of making Nuala feel as if her own anxieties are in fact the only anxieties that anyone on earth has ever experienced, and that her suffering is something she alone, the only unhappy person in a world of thriving and self-confident individuals, can understand.”
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

5 likes

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