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“Don't let the bastards grind you down.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
― The Handmaid’s Tale
“You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.”
― The Brothers Karamazov
― The Brothers Karamazov
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
― The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― The Bell Jar
― The Bell Jar
“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― The Handmaid's Tale
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
― The Handmaid's Tale
Jenn’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Jenn’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
5,307 books
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4,991 friends
7,435 books
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160 friends
4,286 books
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2,069 friends
1,393 books
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362 friends
129 books
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4,970 friends
1,173 books
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4,988 friends
959 books
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796 friends
1,073 books
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3,849 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Adult Fiction, Book Club, Classics, Fiction, History, Literary Fiction, Memoir, Non-fiction, Politics, Sports, Travel, War, Sociology, Substance Abuse, and cats
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