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May’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (1193)
currently-reading‎ (0)

read‎ (563)
did-not-finish‎ (0)

partially-read‎ (141)
around-the-world‎ (46)

western-canon-starter‎ (15)

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May’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for Traveler of the Century: A Novel

Traveler of the Century: A Novel by Andrés Neuman

34 highlights

Álvaro was drawn to Hans’s quiet conviction, the feeling that he knew more than he was saying. He was intrigued by Hans’s way of both being and not being there, that polite frontier from which he listened with an air of being about to turn ...more

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

by Italo Calvino

1 note & 141 highlights

May’s Quotes

“Elisabeth had been listening to the programme in the bath. She'd switched the radio off after it and wondered if she'd be able to listen to Radio 4 in any innocence ever again. Her ears had undergone a sea-change. Or the world had.

But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and —

Rich and what? she thought.
Rich and poor.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

1 likes

“The historian (and for that matter the philosopher) is not God, looking at the world from above and outside. He is a man, and a man of his own time and place. He looks at the past from the point of view of the present: he looks at other countries and civilizations from the point of view of his own. This point of view is valid only for him and people situated like him, but for him it is valid. He must stand firm in it, because it is the only one accessible to him, and unless he has a point of view he can see nothing at all.”
― R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

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“The self is undone before the impossibility of naming: all the previously known names and essentialist categories representing the world and the self are dismantled.”
― An Yountae, The Decolonial Abyss: Mysticism and Cosmopolitics from the Ruins

tags: self

0 likes

“I'm everything that makes everything. I'm everything that unmakes everything. I'm fire. I'm flood. I'm pestilence. I'm the ink, the paper, the grass, the tree, the leaves, the leaf, the greenness in the leaf. I'm the vein in the leaf. I'm the voice that tells no story.”
― Ali Smith, Autumn

6 likes

“Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is greatly in need of stimuli to distract him, he lives alone and gets bored, or, to speak with the clinical exactitude that the present day requires, he has succumbed to the temporary weakness of spirit ordinarily known as depression. To get a clear idea of his situation, suffice it to say that he was married but can no longer remember what led him into matrimony, that he is divorced and cannot now bring himself to ponder the reasons for the separation. On the other hand, while the ill-fated union produced no children who are now demanding to be handed, gratis, the world on a silver platter, he has, for some time, viewed sweet History, the serious, educational subject which he had felt called upon to teach and which could have been a soothing refuge for him, as a chore without meaning and a beginning without an end.”
― José Saramago, The Double

tags: depression, history

1 likes

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