“By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko's death was this: no truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see it through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sorrow that comes to us without warning.”
― Norwegian Wood
― Norwegian Wood
“Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world.”
― Voice of the Fire
― Voice of the Fire
“The relentless onslaught of this stupefying imagery that pounds our inner landscapes flat, a carpet-bombing of the mind. The language of the world, that overwhelms us.”
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“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.”
― The Bell Jar
― The Bell Jar
“History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a function that we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world's insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own.”
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Ruby’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Ruby’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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Art, Classics, Comics, Contemporary, Fiction, Graphic novels, Memoir, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, and Young-adult
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