Matthew Cole

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Book cover for Bullshit Jobs: A Theory
On January 5, 2015, a little more than a year after the article came out, on the first Monday of the new year—that is, the day most Londoners were returning to work from their winter holidays—someone took several hundred ads in London ...more
Matthew Cole
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George Eliot
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
George Eliot, Middlemarch

Italo Calvino
“To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.”
Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused
“Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.”
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Umberto Eco
“I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her "I love you madly", because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly". At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.”
Umberto Eco

Virginia Woolf
“What a lark! What a plunge!”
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

year in books
Signe
863 books | 116 friends

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Tom Goff
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Will St...
164 books | 9 friends

Daniel
211 books | 8 friends

Amy Sta...
32 books | 2 friends

Alice R...
52 books | 199 friends

Jack Go...
171 books | 10 friends

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