Discover new books on Goodreads
Meet your next favorite book

Matthew Avant

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Matthew.


A River Runs thro...
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
Tempest
Matthew Avant is currently reading
by Julie Cross (Goodreads Author)
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
Children of Strife
Matthew Avant is currently reading
by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Goodreads Author)
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
See all 93 books that Matthew is reading…
Book cover for Vita Nostra (Vita Nostra, #1)
“According to Nominalism, universals are names of names, but not of absolute reality or notion . . .”
Matthew Avant
"Names of names" is a very strange notion. I'm not used to thinking of names as having names in turn. In a magical context, immediately I think of the lambda cube, or stratified negations, or Russell's paradox, or consecutive universes of types. of course there is no Name of the Language of Magic. each name for a subset of the language is outside that subset...
Damianne liked this
Loading...
T.E. Lawrence
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
― T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph

Norman Maclean
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

Susan Cooper
“But those men who know anything at all about the Light also know that there is a fierceness to its power, like the bare sword of the law, or the white burning of the sun." Suddenly his voice sounded to Will very strong, and very Welsh. "At the very heart, that is. Other things, like humanity, and mercy, and charity, that most good men hold more precious than all else, they do not come first for the Light. Oh, sometimes they are there; often, indeed. But in the very long run the concern of you people is with the absolute good, ahead of all else. You are like fanatics. Your masters, at any rate. Like the old Crusaders -- oh, like certain groups in every belief, though this is not a matter of religion, of course. At the centre of the Light there is a cold white flame, just as at the centre of the Dark there is a great black pit bottomless as the Universe."
His warm, deep voice ended, and there was only the roar of the engine. Will looked out over the grey-misted fields, silent.
"There was a great long speech, now," John Rowlands said awkwardly. "But I was only saying, be careful not to forget that there are people in this valley who can be hurt, even in the pursuit of good ends.”
― Susan Cooper

Friedrich Nietzsche
“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?... All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is ape to man? A laughing stock or painful embarrassment. And man shall be that to overman: a laughingstock or painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now, too, man is more ape than any ape... The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth... Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss ... what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

David Foster Wallace
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

year in books
Andrea
746 books | 61 friends

Ashley ...
87 books | 28 friends

Michael...
433 books | 80 friends

Abigayl...
136 books | 103 friends

Daria C...
239 books | 191 friends

Hannah ...
769 books | 244 friends

Damianne
2,794 books | 170 friends

Kayla C...
205 books | 167 friends

More friends…


Polls voted on by Matthew

Lists liked by Matthew