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“The honeyed sweetness of Mengele, of his words and of his smile, which he hoped would endow him with some resemblance to the Angel of Death, is the genuine, imbecile expression of every kind of fascination with evil; it is the expression featured in every demi-culture that expects the shoddy junk of the shadows to make amends for its own paltriness. The prohibited act, often as trite as throwing rubbish out of the window, is no less obtuse just because it torments or tortures. The Gorgon, said Joseph Roth about Nazism, is banal. Mengele's victims are characters in a tragedy, but Mengele himself is a figure in a farrago of gibberish.”
― Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea
― Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea
“Creativity eventually comes from the need not to have ourselves or other people eaten by leopards.”
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“Nobody was really surprised when it happened, not really, not on the subconscious level where savage things grow.”
― Carrie
― Carrie
“What's your name?" Oedipa said. "Winthrop Tremaine," replied the spirited entrepreneur, "Winner, for short. Listen, now we're getting up an arrangement with one of the big ready-to-wear outfits in L.A. to see how SS uniforms go for the fall. We're working it in with the back-to-school campaign, lot of 37 longs, you know, teenage kid sizes. Next season we may go all the way and get out a modified version for the ladies. How would that strike you?""I'll let you know," Oedipa said. "I'll keep you in mind." She left, wondering if she should've called him something, or tried to hit him with any of a dozen surplus, heavy, blunt objects in easy reach. There had been no witnesses. Why hadn't she?”
― The Crying of Lot 49
― The Crying of Lot 49
“Originally, he'd wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H's life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H's story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he'd have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He'd have to talk about Harlem, And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father's heroin addiction - the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the '60s, wouldn't he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the '80s? And if he wrote about crack, he'd inevitably be writing, to, about the "war on drugs." And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he'd be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five-year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he'd gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he'd get so angry that he'd slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University. And if he slammed the book down, then everyone in the room would stare and all they would see would be his skin and his anger, and they'd think they knew something about him, and it would be the same something that had justified putting his great-grandpa H in prison, only it would be different too, less obvious than it once was.”
― Homegoing
― Homegoing
500 Great Books By Women
— 1615 members
— last activity Sep 01, 2025 05:18AM
500 Great Books By Women A Reader's Guide to the Worlds of Women's Writing Be sure to check out the bookshelf and see if you've reviewed any of the ...more
Nobel Prize Winners
— 655 members
— last activity Jun 01, 2025 01:41PM
From the sublime to the abstruse, from the bestsellers to the rightly unknown. To read the winners of the Nobel Prize in literature is a roller coaste ...more
Divine Comedy + Decameron
— 266 members
— last activity Nov 07, 2020 01:07PM
This group is for those interested in reading either or both Dante's Divine Comedy or Boccaccio's Decameron in 2014. Each read will be non-concurrent ...more
The Nobel Prize in Literature
— 407 members
— last activity Jun 23, 2024 04:33AM
Ah, the Nobel Prize! The decision of a jury of aristocratic Swedes who, since 1901, have awarded the prize to seven of their countrymen and one of the ...more
Sweden
— 3170 members
— last activity Nov 06, 2025 07:57AM
This is a group for Swedes on Goodreads or anyone interested in Sweden and Swedish literature. Här pratar vi svenska böcker eller pratar om böcker, li ...more
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