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103 books
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82 voters
Frederic
is currently reading
Reading for the 2nd time
read in April 2020
Frederic said:
"
A perceptive and beautifully written biography of a great American writer...devotees of his novels,stories,and essays will love this book and those who are not familiar with the work will find much here to stimulate their interest...for more than fif
...more
"
“Memory, the whole lying opera of it, is killing me now.”
― Airships
― Airships
“Once I had read in an Edmund Wilson essay of his dislike of women past menopause. He said they were like dried fruits, withered on the vine. The juice was gone. I understood what he meant. Although the words stabbed my heart even then, before I was forty. What about your juice? I had written in the margins of the book. But I knew that crones were female and old men were kings, stallions, and producers of heirs. Saul Bellow had a baby at the age of eighty-three. He didn't live long enough after that for her to play Cordelia to his Lear.”
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“The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.”
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“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
― The Origins of Totalitarianism
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
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Frederic’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Frederic’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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Favorite Genres
Biography, Book Club, Children's, Classics, Comics, Crime, Fantasy, Fiction, Graphic novels, History, Memoir, Mystery, Non-fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Religion, Science, Science fiction, Suspense, Sports, Thriller, Young-adult, and War
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