I also knew that it was important to cry when somebody died. After Mr. Hyland’s heart attack, I’d seen the librarian sobbing in the hallway. And when Grandpa and I sat down on the train, I noticed him slide his thumb beneath his eyes
...more
“Finally, to hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something laughable.”
― On Being Ill
― On Being Ill
“I get that nothing lasts. But why do I have to miss everybody so much?”
― Turtles All the Way Down
― Turtles All the Way Down
“There's an expression in classical music. It goes, 'We went out to the meadow.' It's for those evenings that can only be described in that way: There were no walls, there were no music stands, there weren't even any instruments. There was no ceiling, there was no floor, we all went out to the meadow. It describes a feeling.
(Tom Waits quote)”
― Turtles All the Way Down
(Tom Waits quote)”
― Turtles All the Way Down
“I was so good at being a kid, and so terrible at being whatever I was now.”
― Turtles All the Way Down
― Turtles All the Way Down
Hannah’s 2025 Year in Books
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