“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”
― Black Skin, White Masks
― Black Skin, White Masks
“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― The Lathe of Heaven
― The Lathe of Heaven
“Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars [translated from Trauerspiel, 1928].”
― The Origin of German Tragic Drama
― The Origin of German Tragic Drama
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
― The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”
― Shadow & Claw
― Shadow & Claw
David’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at David’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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