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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.

Scottsdale Public Library and 2 other people liked this

Shaun’s Quotes

“In social networks, the function of "friends" is primarily to heighten narcissism by granting attention, as consumers, to the ego exhibited as a commodity.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Müdigkeitsgesellschaft

tags: consumerism, friends, narcisism, social-media, social-networks

56 likes

“Is it possible that even happy moments of pleasure never stand up to a rigorous examination? Possible.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

tags: bygone-glory, happiness, les-jadis, love, memory, the-good-old-days

55 likes

“He often makes blithe remarks about things he 'wishes'. I wish you didn't have to go, he says when she's leaving, or: I wish you could stay the night. If he really wished any of those things, Marianne knows, then they would happen. Connell always gets what he wants, and then feels sorry for himself when what he wants doesn't make him happy.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

138 likes

“I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that—in good faith, certainly, with affection—I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”
― Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

45 likes

“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

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