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294,008 voters
“You have never heard me talk much. But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools.”
― For Whom the Bell Tolls
― For Whom the Bell Tolls
“There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.”
― The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
― The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
“There is never any ending to Paris, and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other. Paris was always worth it, and you received return for whatever you brought to it…”
― A Moveable Feast
― A Moveable Feast
“I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”
― The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
― The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
“It's a nice big fat philosophical question, about: how do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between.”
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A group for people who enjoy literature written by Japanese authors, the arts, culture, and history of Japan. July 2026: Strange Buildings by Uketsu ...more
Alex’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Alex’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
690 books
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57 friends
331 books
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97 friends
1,385 books
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97 friends
134 books
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59 friends
183 books
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4 friends
271 books
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76 friends
218 books
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66 friends
165 books
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5 friends
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Favorite Genres
Art, Biography, Contemporary, Crime, Music, Non-fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion, Science fiction, and Self help
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