Anna

Anna’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (1559)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (863)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
memoirs‎ (79)
my-favorites‎ (74)
cuba‎ (73)
mothers-and-daughters‎ (69)
francophonie-etc‎ (67)
poetry‎ (66)
books-in-translation‎ (63)
latin-america‎ (61)

grief‎ (57)
immigrant-stories‎ (51)
middle-grade-books‎ (48)
portugal‎ (45)
brujeria‎ (40)
motherhood‎ (40)
fathers-and-daughters‎ (39)
new-york‎ (36)
historical-fiction‎ (35)
favorite-children-s-books‎ (33)
marriage‎ (32)
dirty-dictatorships‎ (29)

wanderlust‎ (29)
caribbean‎ (28)
books-about-books‎ (26)
female-friendships‎ (25)
books-about-madness‎ (23)
magia-dragones-monstruos-etc‎ (23)
mothers-and-sons‎ (22)
men-at-war‎ (20)
italian-language‎ (18)
southern‎ (18)
ukraine‎ (18)
cccp‎ (17)

what-gets-me-cooking‎ (16)
brasil‎ (15)
angola‎ (14)
philadelphia‎ (13)
times-of-plague‎ (13)
dystopian‎ (12)
fathers-and-sons‎ (12)
about-translation‎ (11)
time-travel‎ (10)
about-writing‎ (9)
greece-modern‎ (9)
human-rights‎ (9)

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Anna’s Quotes

“your chest burns with nostalgia for all the beautiful years that didn't seem beautiful at the time, they just felt normal...”
― Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

0 likes

“As minhas grandes saudades
São do que nunca enlacei.
Ai, como eu tenho saudades
Dos sonhos que não sonhei!”
― Mário de Sá-Carneiro

tags: poesia-portuguesa, saudade

2 likes

“This is why I wanted to write this book, to tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine, and how that feels marvelous and exceptional. All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: Here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.”
― Susan Orlean, The Library Book

7 likes

“Memory must have a good PR agent, because in reality, as an instrument of optical precision, it seems to me little better than a fairground kaleidoscope. To reconstruct an experience on the basis of images stored in our brains at times borders on hallucination. We do not recover the past, we re-create it: an act of dramaturgy if ever there was one. Memory edits things, colors them, mixes cement with the rainbow, does whatever’s needed to make the story work.”
― María Gainza, Portrait of an Unknown Lady

5 likes

“The psychoanalyst Otto Rank declared modern love a religious problem. As we grow increasingly secular and move away from the towns where we were born, we can no longer use religion or community to confirm our meaning in the world, so we seize a love partner instead, someone to distract us from the fact of our animal existence. French existentialist Albert Camus said it best: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”
― Caitlin Doughty, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory

tags: death, love, religion

6 likes

More of Anna’s quotes…