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aina is Currently Reading

aina is currently reading

Rebecca

by Daphne du Maurier

bookshelves: currently-reading, 2026-read

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progress:

(page 216 of 449)
— 16 hours, 48 min ago

Jan 07, 2026 05:22AM

“Being beautiful, was that for men?'
'Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

232 likes

“The cruel thing about grief is that it doesn’t care where you are or how you’re feeling. Out of nowhere, a random memory descends, even if your mind has been running a hundred miles an hour over the hundred things on your to-do list. The memory could be of the most mundane, ordinary day, and still, it’ll send an ancient sadness through you. The sort of sadness you imagine humans have felt since creation, but that you never imagined you could experience so deep inside.”
― Ruben Reyes Jr., There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven: A Collection of Short Stories of Fantasy, Migration, and Central American Identity

3 likes

“Music is like spoken language, inextricable from its culture. If you don't learn a language early in life, its words will forever come out wrinkled and accented by another world, no matter how well you memorize or love the vocabulary, grammar, and cadences of a new language. This is why foreign "belly dancers" have always bothered me. The use of our music as a prop to wiggle and shimmy and jump around offends me. Eastern music is the soundtrack of me..”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

tags: cultural-appropriation, culture

5 likes

“But I know now that going from place to place is just something exiles have to do. Whatever the reason, the earth is never steady beneath our feet.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

tags: palestine

11 likes

“It amazed me to see how quickly they got comfortable in the new apartment and settled into a routine, as if their lives had simply been excised and replaced elsewhere, intact, with just a dusting of grief they shook off before returning to the business of living. Maybe it was easier because the trauma of forced displacement was already well-known to them, and they understood how idleness and purposelessness could dull the mind, droop the eyelids, and seep too much sleep and despair into the day. They were experienced refugees, better equipped to handle recurring generational trauma.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

10 likes

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