“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― The Bell Jar
― The Bell Jar
“A single metaphor can give birth to love.”
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us.”
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”
― The Uses of Literature
― The Uses of Literature
“Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.”
― The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
― The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Literature to Explore the World in Quarantine
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— last activity May 08, 2020 05:48PM
Literature that I found over the years from different parts of the world, and a lot of NYRB Classics books.
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