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A century ago, survival was the main event. Longing was an accepted part of existence. Today, the inability to achieve happiness or fit in with the herd is treated as a kind of moral failure.
“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.”
― The Name of the Rose
― The Name of the Rose
“To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in any place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and the when in which you vanished.”
― If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
― If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
“Okla ete ablotse. ‘My spirit has traveled abroad even if my body has not.”
― Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World
― Indigo: In Search of the Color That Seduced the World
“A sense of pleasure or satisfaction with a dictionary is possible. It might arise when finding confirmation of a word’s guessed spelling (i.e., i before e), or upon retrieving from it a word that had momentarily come loose from the tip of your tongue. The pleasure of reading rather than using a dictionary might come when amongst its pages you find a word that is new to you and neatly sums up a sensation, quality or experience that had hitherto gone nameless: a moment of solidarity and recognition—someone else must have had the same sensation as me—I am not alone! Pleasure may come with the sheer glee at the textures of an unfamiliar word, its new taste between your teeth. Glume. Forb. The anatomy of a word strimmed clean or porched in your teeth.”
― The Liar's Dictionary
― The Liar's Dictionary
“You fling the book on the floor, you would hurl it out of the window, even out of the closed window, through the slats of the Venetian blinds; let them shred its incongruous quires, let sentences, words, morphemes, phonemes gush forth, beyond recomposition into discourse; through the panes, and if they are of unbreakable glass so much the better, hurl the book and reduce it to photons, undulatory vibrations, polarized spectra; through the wall, let the book crumble into molecules and atoms passing between atom and atom of the reinforced concrete, breaking up into electrons, neutrons, neutrinos, elementary particles more and more minute; through the telephone wires, let it be reduced to electronic impulses, into flow of information, shaken by redundancies and noises, and let it be degraded into a swirling entropy.”
― If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
― If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Thomas’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Thomas’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1 book
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154 friends
66 books
|
39 friends
40 books
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49 friends
1 book
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51 friends
2 books
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4 friends
11 books
|
8 friends
46 books
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33 friends
1 book
|
42 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Thomas
Lists liked by Thomas
