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https://lifeslittleblog.blogspot.com/2020/07/50-book-challenge.html

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Virginia Woolf
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Michael Cunningham
“How often since then has she wondered what might have happened if she'd tried to remain with him; if she’d returned Richard's kiss on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal, gone off somewhere (where?) with him, never bought the packet of incense or the alpaca coat with rose-shaped buttons. Couldn’t they have discovered something larger and stranger than what they've got. It is impossible not to imagine that other future, that rejected future, as taking place in Italy or France, among big sunny rooms and gardens; as being full of infidelities and great battles; as a vast and enduring romance laid over friendship so searing and profound it would accompany them to the grave and possibly even beyond. She could, she thinks, have entered another world. She could have had a life as potent and dangerous as literature itself.

Or then again maybe not, Clarissa tells herself. That's who I was. This is who I am--a decent woman with a good apartment, with a stable and affectionate marriage, giving a party. Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up just sailing from port to port.

Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at the pond's edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened to hers; (exciting and utterly familiar, she'd never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met its own. They'd kissed and walked around the pond together.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk. The anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.”
Michael Cunningham, The Hours

Cormac McCarthy
“Listen to me, he said, when your dreams are of some world that never was or some world that never will be, and you're happy again, then you'll have given up. Do you understand? And you can't give up, I won't let you.”
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Samuel Beckett
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Haruki Murakami
“Whatever it is you're seeking won't come in the form you're expecting.”
Haruki Marukami

70401 Λέσχη του Βιβλίου — 1959 members — last activity Feb 07, 2026 04:17PM
Η ελληνική ομάδα για το διάβασμα και το ξαναδιάβασμα. Γνωστή και ως Λέσχη του Βιβλίου.
105402 Βιβλιοσκώληκες — 1664 members — last activity Sep 04, 2025 10:45AM
Μία λέσχη για όλους τους Βιβλιοσκώληκες του κόσμου, με video reviews για βιβλία που αγαπάμε.
119774 Έλληνες Αναγνώστες στο GoodReads — 158 members — last activity Jan 12, 2014 08:58AM
Ένα γκρουπ για Έλληνες αναγνώστες! Εδώ μπορούμε να μοιραστούμε τα αγαπημένα μας βιβλία ( Ελλήνων και μη συγγραφέων, να μιλήσουμε γι αυτά, να τα σχολιά ...more
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