“no disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business. But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they were given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering.”
―
―
“Hakujin don't know when a smile is an insult." Hakujin were white people. She always said her experience showed that if you hated white people, they would just hate you back, and nothing would change in the world; and if you didn't hate them after the way they treated you, you would end up hating yourself, and nothing would change that way, either. So it was no good to hate them, and it was no good not to hate the. So nothing changed.”
― Floating World
― Floating World
“Smoking while vacuuming makes vacuuming better but smoking while sitting on the couch makes vacuuming harder.”
―
―
“Cognitive psychologists have confirmed what we already knew: that readers of complex novels show a greater capacity for understanding the complexities of human interaction.8”
― Balzac's Lives
― Balzac's Lives
Silver Screen Book Club
— 420 members
— last activity Jul 17, 2026 05:36PM
For anyone interested in black and white movies, actors from the dawn of film through the 1960s, or the culture of the era, this is the book club for ...more
Tom’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Tom’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Polls voted on by Tom
Lists liked by Tom























































