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“And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.”
― Exit West
― Exit West
“To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.”
― Exit West
― Exit West
“We are all migrants through time.”
― Exit West
― Exit West
“Meanwhile I chain-smoked Bali cigarettes, looking at the window at the highway and thinking about the disaster that was my life.”
― Last Evenings on Earth
― Last Evenings on Earth
“I don’t know when I started to realize that my country’s past was incomprehensible and obscure to me, a real shadowy terrain, nor can I remember the precise moment when all that i’d believed so trustworthy and predictable—the place I’d grown up, whose language I speak and customs I know, the place whose past I was taught in school and in university, whose present I have become accustomed to interpreting and pretending I understand—began to turn into a place of shadows out of whcih jumped horrible creatures as soon as we dropped our guard. With time I have come to think that this is the true reason why writers write aboutn the places of childhood and adolescence and even their early touth: you don’t write about what you know and understand, and much less do you write because you know and understand, but because you understand that all your knowledge and comprehension is false, a mirage and an illusion, so your books are not, could not be, more than elaborate displays of disorientation: extensive and multifarious declarations of preplexity. All that I thought was so clear, you then think, now turns out to be full of duplicities and hidden intentions, like a friend who betrays us. To that revelation, which is always annoying and often frankly painful, the writer responds in the only way one knows how: with a book. And that’s how you try to mitigate your disconcertion, reduce the space between what you don’t know and what can be known, and most of all resolve your profound disagreement with that unpredictable reality. “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric,” wrote Yeats. “Out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” And what happens when both quarrels arise at the same time, when fighting with the world is a reflection or a transfiguration of the subterranean but constant confrontation you have with yourself? Then you write a book like the one I’m writing now, and blindly trust that the book will mean something to somebody else.”
― La forma de las ruinas
― La forma de las ruinas
The Bridgeburners
— 292 members
— last activity Jul 19, 2024 12:29PM
The group for those who are engulfed in The Tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen (Steven Erikson).
The Malazan Fallen
— 1606 members
— last activity Dec 01, 2024 05:29PM
For those of us who have fallen for the Malazan series and need a place to read or re-read, discuss and dream. We did a massive reading of the Book o ...more
Piyush’s 2024 Year in Books
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