Ilse
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Ilse

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Paris in Ruins: L...
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  (page 14 of 384)
"The events of 1870-71 impressed on everyone who experienced them a profound sense of precariousness. Many who lived through the Terrible Year succumbed to a new and suddenly deeper sense of existential fragility, and it is hard not to see Impressionism’s emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and transient domesticity as expressions of this heightened awareness of change and mortality." Dec 22, 2025 02:20AM

 
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Dead and Alive
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  (page 279 of 331)
"Art is one of the ways we reveal the peculiarities of consciousness – for me it’s the clearest way. It’s through other people’s novels,other people’s paintings, other people’s poems & other people’s music that I am made aware that everybody is not like anyone else, and yet we are all stuck inside these flesh cages, experiencing what we imagine to be a shared reality through a radically singular medium: consciousness." Dec 21, 2025 05:57AM

 
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Alexander Blok
“Night, street and streetlight, drugstore,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century –
Nothing will change. There’s no way out.

You’ll die – and start all over, live twice,
Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canal’s rippled icy surface,
The drugstore, the street, and streetlight.”
Alexander Blok

Ali Abdollahi
“I hide your portrait
in a closet with no holes
your dress
in the dresser
I place the mirror on the bracket
upside down

remains of your hair
are dancing on the windowsill
in direction of the wind

in my room
there is always
a vacant chair”
Ali Abdollahi

Emily Dickinson
“I am glad you have an hour for books, those enthralling friends, the immortalities...”
Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson: Letters

Franz Kafka
“I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face”
Franz Kafka

Ono no Komachi
“Is this love reality
Or a dream?
I cannot know,
When both reality and dreams
Exist without truly existing.”
Ono no Komachi, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan

1200771 Elizabeth Taylor - Just one to begin with . . . — 12 members — last activity Jan 26, 2024 04:25AM
Hi Friends - completed A Game of Hide and Seek - and moving on...
345771 Homer's The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson — 198 members — last activity Aug 15, 2025 01:06PM
In this group, we will read and discuss Emily Wilson's new translation of Homer's The Odyssey, published in November 2017 by Norton. We also welcome d ...more
1187035 The Short Story Club — 550 members — last activity 11 hours, 11 min ago
The purpose of this group is to read and discuss one short story a week. For the the first couple of years, we read from specific anthologies, but fro ...more
1225725 Tessa Hadley Fans — 6 members — last activity Feb 04, 2024 03:44PM
A small group to read Tessa Hadley's latest novel - Free Love. Start date - tentative - January 2024 ...more
25x33 Girl by Edna O'Brien - Starting 10 January 2025 — 5 members — last activity Apr 11, 2025 04:01PM
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