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“We do so many things together. We go to theatres, exhibitions, bookstores, we spend hours and hours discussing politics, books, films, friends. And you think I do these things for the same reason you do, because I enjoy them. But you're wrong. I do them all for it, for the tapeworm. That's how it seems to me: that my whole life is no longer for my sake but for the sake of what I carry inside me, of which I am now no more than a servant.”
― Letters to a Young Novelist
― Letters to a Young Novelist
“Encore sous le choc, nous étions en train de comprendre que faire ce que nous avions toujours fait pouvait désormais nous valoir une condamnation, qu'il suffisait d'une blague, d'un bon mot, d'une seule phrase, pour que la police déboule à l'aube et nous embarque. Face au vague et à l'immensité de cette menace nouvelle, il ne nous restait que la peur, une peur muette, collective.”
― Madame Hayat
― Madame Hayat
“All of us, more or less, wear masks. Because without masks we can’t survive in this violent world. Beneath an evil-spirit mask lies the natural face of an angel, beneath an angel’s mask lies the face of an evil spirit. It’s impossible to have just one or the other. That’s who we are. And that’s Carnaval. Schumann was able to see the many faces of humanity—the masks and the real faces—because he himself was a deeply divided soul, a person who lived in the stifling gap in between the two.”
― First Person Singular: Stories
― First Person Singular: Stories
“Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last - possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.”
― The Writing of the Disaster
― The Writing of the Disaster
“Translation is like any art: in the best of cases, it helps shed light on ourselves, on those hidden corners of ourselves that we barely knew existed, and whose discovery has enriched us. It exposes us to minds and voices able to awaken in us a particular sense of delight, an irreplaceable thrill of discovery that is avail- able nowhere else. The ability of these minds and voices to do this is unique, not because they come from a foreign land—or at least, not solely because of it—but because they are sui generis, as exceptional in their own culture as they appear in ours.”
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Our Shared Shelf
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— last activity Jul 22, 2026 11:54PM
OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM. Dear Readers, As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading ...more
Tunisia
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— last activity Feb 03, 2026 03:19AM
All Tunisian readers, Tunisian books and so on
Lobna’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Lobna’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
2,396 books
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908 friends
564 books
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690 friends
655 books
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342 friends
1,911 books
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3,336 friends
118 books
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152 friends
1,111 books
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720 friends
740 books
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93 friends
1,711 books
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301 friends
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