

“When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”
― A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
― A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
― The Metamorphosis
― The Metamorphosis

“A man who is not afraid of the sea will soon be drownded, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But WE do be afraid of the sea, and we do only be drownded now and again.”
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“I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake. Which, as it bears me from no fatherland away, bears me onward to no shipwreck.”
― Molloy
― Molloy

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
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Patrick’s 2024 Year in Books
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