Jess

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Jess’s currently-reading shelf

Prayer Under Eyelids by Karthik Sethuraman

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Jess’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (492)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (222)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
memoirs‎ (41)
grief-death-dying‎ (28)

essay-collections‎ (13)
top-of-2023‎ (13)
politics-justice-etc‎ (12)
lgbtq‎ (11)
read-next‎ (10)
best-coming-of-age‎ (9)

feminism‎ (6)
poetry‎ (6)
top-of-2024-25‎ (6)
short-story-collections‎ (4)
athletics‎ (2)
science‎ (2)

climate-enviornment-etc‎ (1)
metaphysics‎ (1)
to-buy-next‎ (1)

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Jess’s Quotes

“Mostly I have felt myself becoming a servant of sadness. I am still looking for the beauty in that.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

tags: beauty, loneliness, sadness, thought-provoking

347 likes

“The priest had been kind but could not draw her out. Instead she chose to tell her story in the greater church, the green cathedral that is nature. For nature too is holy, more holy than the icons, more holy than the relics of saints. These were dead things compared to the most insignificant living thing. The fox knows this, and the deer, and the pine.”
― Patti Smith, Devotion

8 likes

“Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – 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. I”
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

13 likes

“In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love, and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

123 likes

“My sister was just another girl doomed by politics and ancestral texts that say a girl’s destiny is to be wholesome, obedient, and quietly attractive, but invisible when need be. Nailed to the cross of her own gender, a girl finds herself between the mother and the prehistoric rib, where there’s little space to be anything other than a daughter who lives alongside sons but is not equal to them. These boys who can howl like tomcats in heat, pawing their way through a feast of flesh, never to be called a slut or a whore like my sister was.”
― Tiffany McDaniel, Betty

26 likes

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