“I know women whose entire personas are woven from a benign mediocrity. Their lives are a list of shortcomings: the unappreciative boyfriend, the extra ten pounds, the dismissive boss, the conniving sister, the straying husband. I've always hovered above their stories, nodding in sympathy and thinking how foolish they are, these women, to let these things happen, how undisciplined. And now to be one of them! One of the women with the endless stories that make people nod sympathetically and think: Poor dumb bitch.”
― Gone Girl
― Gone Girl
“But the other Ministers considered that to employ a magician was one thing, novelists were quite another and they would not stoop to it.”
― Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
― Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
“The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one that looks as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more stairways than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.”
― Guards! Guards!
― Guards! Guards!
“Everybody is taken in at some period or another. [...] In marriage especially. [...] There is not one in a hundred of either sex, who is not taken in when they marry. Look where I will, I see that it is so; and I feel that it must be so, when I consider that it is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest with themselves.”
― Mansfield Park
― Mansfield Park
“If other magicians think differently from you, then you must battle it out with them. You must prove the superiority of your opinions, as I do in politics. You must argue and publish and practise your magic and you must learn to live as I do – in the face of constant criticism, opposition and censure. That, sir, is the English way.”
― Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
― Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Goldkehlchen20’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Goldkehlchen20’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Goldkehlchen20
Lists liked by Goldkehlchen20


















