Xanat

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Xanat’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (57)
currently-reading‎ (0)

read‎ (569)
did-not-finish‎ (0)

favorites‎ (11)
to-read-in-2019‎ (6)

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Xanat’s Notes & Highlights

The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

3 notes & 12 highlights

When she mentioned the seer to the men who worked the counter at Katz’s, their arms tattooed with numbers, they stared at her with fear. “Kids,” said one of them. “Why would you wanna get mixed up with something like that?”

Agreed. Watch these men become the wisest people in the book.

See Xanat’s 5 books with notes and highlights…

Xanat’s Quotes

“There was something unbearable in the things, in the people, in the buildings, in the streets that, only if you reinvented it all, as in a game, became acceptable. The essential, however, was to know how to play, and she and I, only she and I, knew how to do it.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

98 likes

“I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don't recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that's all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.”
― Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

tags: childhood, violence

139 likes

“Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

284 likes

“I waited to be told what was good about me. [...] All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you- the boys had spent that time becoming themselves.”
― Emma Cline, The Girls

tags: boys, discovery, feminism, gender-inequality, girls

284 likes

“Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here’s the truth: life is a catastrophe. The basic fact of existence – of walking around trying to feed ourselves and find friends and whatever else we do – is a catastrophe. Forget all this ridiculous ‘Our Town’ nonsense everyone talks: the miracle of a newborn babe, the joy of one simple blossom, Life You Are Too Wonderful To Grasp, &c. For me – and I’ll keep repeating it doggedly till I die, till I fall over on my ungrateful nihilistic face and am too weak to say it: better never born, than born into this cesspool. Sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins, and broken hearts. No release, no appeal, no “do-overs” to employ a favored phrase of Xandra’s, no way forward but age and loss, and no way out but death.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

tags: life

505 likes

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