Jim Bilbro

Jim’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (67)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (375)
20th-century-literature‎ (98)
american-literature‎ (50)
sci-fi‎ (43)
science-fiction‎ (43)
british-literature‎ (40)
books-in-translation‎ (36)
favorites‎ (33)
classic-literature‎ (32)
fantasy‎ (31)

books-i-intend-to-review‎ (29)
class‎ (28)
historical-fiction‎ (28)
distopian-fiction‎ (25)
absurdism‎ (23)
collections‎ (23)
non-fiction‎ (23)
alienation‎ (22)
distopian-future‎ (22)
sci-fi-fantasy‎ (19)
contemporary-literature‎ (18)
memoir‎ (17)

detective-fiction‎ (16)
autobiography‎ (15)
childrens-literature‎ (15)
mystery‎ (15)
short-stories‎ (15)
crime‎ (14)
history‎ (14)
nihilism‎ (14)
war‎ (14)
capitalism‎ (13)
humor‎ (13)
humour‎ (13)

post-apocalyptic-fiction‎ (13)
crime-fiction‎ (12)
drugs‎ (12)
essays‎ (12)
french-literature‎ (12)
21st-century-literature‎ (11)
coming-of-age‎ (11)
gender‎ (11)
russian-literature‎ (11)
bohemianism‎ (10)
creative-nonfiction‎ (10)
identity‎ (10)

Stats | More…

Jim’s Quotes

“You're a cis-het dude-bro on strike for better conditions.”
― Nell Zink, Nicotine

1 likes

“I often ask myself whether my decision to pursue a life of scholarship -- if decision is the right word -- was a result of an essential poverty of the soul, or if the desiccation which I sometimes suspect is the one truly distinguishing mark of my scholarship was an inevitable consequence of that decision.”
― John Banville, The Untouchable

3 likes

“Let's say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they're closer to the bed. We've all been this person, so there is no place for judgment, but the solution is simple:

Fewer dishes.

”
― Miranda July, The First Bad Man

3 likes

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

tags: communism, nazism, post-factual, totalitarianism

377 likes

“The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships. Coming from the class-ridden society of the nation-state, whose cracks had been cemented with nationalistic sentiment, it is only natural that these masses, in the first helplessness of their new experience, have tended toward an especially violent nationalism, to which mass leaders have yielded against their own instincts and purposes for purely demagogic reasons.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

tags: 1968, 1994, classless-society, incel, nationalism, nazism, the-masses, totalitarianism, trumpism

33 likes

More of Jim’s quotes…