Discover new books on Goodreads
Meet your next favorite book
“But our missed opportunities never leave us, and every time they come back to haunt us, we ache. Or perhaps what haunts us is that nagging thought that things might have turned out differently. Because without that thought, we would put it down to fate and accept it.”
― Madonna in a Fur Coat: A Novel by Sabahattin Ali
― Madonna in a Fur Coat: A Novel by Sabahattin Ali
“For me, love is something else entirely. It’s beyond all logic and impossible to describe or define. It’s one thing to like someone. To be consumed, body and soul, by desire is quite another. That’s what love is to me — desire that’s all-consuming. Desire that’s impossible to resist!”
― Madonna in a Fur Coat
― Madonna in a Fur Coat
“Physical love only rarely merges with the soul's love. What does the soul actually do when the body unites (in that age-old, universal, immutable motion) with another body? What a wealth of invention it finds in those moments, thus reaffirming its superiority over the monotony of the corporeal life! How it scorns the body, and uses it (together with its partner) as a pretext for insane fantasies a thousand times more carnal than the two coupled bodies! Or conversely: how it belittles the body by leaving it to its pendular to-and-fro while the soul (already wearied by the caprices of the body) turns its thoughts entirely elsewhere: to a game of chess, to recollections of dinner, to a book...”
― The Joke
― The Joke
“It was only an idea, a sudden flash, but it kept coming back to me, and I couldn't help thinking, why am I alive, what good is there in going on, but it's not true really, I didn't think anything of the sort, I was hardly thinking at all, I just imagined myself no longer alive and suddenly I felt such bliss, such strange bliss that I wanted to laugh and maybe really did begin to laugh.”
― The Joke
― The Joke
“Until that day at the dress department Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literally everything for me – but a woman. Our love in the physical sense of the word had proceeded no further than the kissing stage. And even the way she kissed was childish (I'd fallen in love with those kisses, long but chaste, with dry closed lips counting each other's fine striations as they touched in emotion).In short, until then I had felt tenderness for Lucie, but no sensual desire; I'd grown so accustomed to its absence that I wasn't even conscious of it; my relationship with Lucie seemed so beautiful that I could never have dreamed anything was missing. Everything fit so harmoniously together: Lucie, her monastically gray clothes, and my monastically chaste relation with her.”
― The Joke
― The Joke
neafner’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at neafner’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
149 books
|
6 friends
62 books
|
5 friends
87 books
|
3 friends
5 books
|
2 friends
35 books
|
11 friends
50 books
|
1 friend
Polls voted on by neafner
Lists liked by neafner