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“Who are you? A simple son of the soil, as you pretend to yourself? Oh, no. You, too, are among the infirm—you are the dreamer, the madman in a madder world, our own midwestern Don Quixote without his Sancho, gamboling under the blue sky… But you have the taint, the old infirmity. You think there's something here, something to find. Well, in the world you'd learn soon enough. You, too, are cut out for failure; not that you'd fight the world. You'd let it chew you up and spit you out, and you'd lie there wondering what was wrong. Because you'd always expect the world to be something it had no wish to be. The weevil in the cotton, the worm in the beanstalk, the borer in the corn. You couldn't face them, and you couldn't fight them; because you're too weak, and you're too strong. And you have no place to go in the world.”
― Stoner
― Stoner
“Like many men who consider their success incomplete, he was extraordinarily vain and consumed with a sense of his own importance.”
― Stoner
― Stoner
“What is best about our lives -the moments when we are, as we would put it, at our happiest- is both pleasant and deeply unpleasant. Happiness is not a feeling; it is a way of being. If we focus on the feelings, we will miss the point.”
― The Philosopher and the Wolf
― The Philosopher and the Wolf
“Love has many faces. And if you love, you have to be strong enough to look upon all of them. The essence of philia is, I think, far harsher, far crueller, than we care to admit. There is one thing without which philia cannot exist; and this is not a matter of feeling but of the will. Philia—the love appropriate to your pack—is the will to do something for those who are of your pack, even though you desperately don’t want to do it, even though it horrifies and sickens you, and even though you may ultimately have to pay a very high price for it, perhaps heavier than you can bear. You do this because that is what is best for them. You do this because you must. You may never have to do this. But you must always be ready to do it. Love is sometimes sickening. Love can damn you for all eternity. Love will take you to hell. But if you are lucky, if you are very lucky, it will bring you back again.”
― The Philosopher and the Wolf
― The Philosopher and the Wolf
“On an impulse he switched out the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicate and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height or depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything—the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars—seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness.”
― Stoner
― Stoner
Amanda’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Amanda’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,177 books
|
9 friends
22 books
|
3 friends
0 books
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1 friend
1 book
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2 friends
30 books
|
22 friends
2 books
|
31 friends
0 books
|
31 friends
187 books
|
79 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Amanda
Lists liked by Amanda
