Her Majesty, the Austrians call their cannon, and for the past week these men have tended to it the way worker bees might tend to a queen. They’ve fed her oils, repainted her barrel, lubricated her wheels; they’ve arranged sandbags at her
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“Six minutes? Seven?”
― All the Bright Places
― All the Bright Places
“To the extent that I had come to understand that despair does not necessarily result in annihilation, that one can go on as usual in spite of it, I had become hardened. Was this what it means to be an adult, to live with ugly ambiguities? I didn't like it, but it made it easier to go on.”
― Kitchen
― Kitchen
“William Stoner, to whom that expression was as familiar as the air he walked in, saw the signs of a general despair he had known since he was a boy. He saw good men go down into a slow decline of hopelessness, broken as their vision of a decent life was broken; he saw them walking aimlessly upon the streets, their eyes empty like shards of broken glass”
― Stoner: A Novel
― Stoner: A Novel
“I am afraid. Not of life, or death, or nothingness, but of wasting it as if I had never been.”
― Flowers for Algernon
― Flowers for Algernon
“He had, in odd ways, given it to every moment of his life, and had perhaps given it most fully when he was unaware of his giving. It was a passion neither of the mind nor of the flesh; rather, it was a force that comprehended them both, as if they were but the matter of love, its specific substance. To a woman or to a poem, it said simply: Look! I am alive.”
― Stoner
― Stoner
Benjamin’s 2025 Year in Books
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