Katrina

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Katrina’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (192)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (307)
did-not-finish‎ (15)
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classics‎ (40)

fiction‎ (20)
favorites‎ (19)
comics‎ (8)
jewish-history‎ (7)
history‎ (6)
queer-bee-books‎ (6)

sci-fi‎ (6)
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politics‎ (5)
judaism‎ (4)
misc-non-fiction‎ (4)
fantasy‎ (3)

holocaust‎ (3)
ya‎ (2)
poetry‎ (1)
science‎ (1)

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“Because all the characters in this story—like all of humanity, apparently—have a little blank spot in their heads that says, “Kings. What a good idea.” The idea is powerful, and seductive, and should not be underestimated. To be a civilization of any worth, however, means acknowledging the idea—and then condemning it as laughably, madly stupid. May we come to live in such a worthier world, and soon.”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption

11 likes

“We are powerful enough to light the world at night, to artificially refrigerate food, to leave Earth’s atmosphere and orbit it from outer space. But we cannot save those we love from suffering. This is the story of human history as I understand it—the story of an organism that can do so much, but cannot do what it most wants.”
― John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection

tags: life, loss, love, suffering

122 likes

“Years later he would discover that in Britain it was customary for a fourth son to carry the image of a swift on his shield, because a swift was a bird that was believed to have no feet and spent its entire life on the wing, never landing, from birth to death.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

2 likes

“But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled one into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends.”
― Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

4 likes

“an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

83 likes

More of Katrina’s quotes…