“Your personality is not just a matter of what you know about yourself, but what others know about you. You are one person with your mother, and another with your lover, and yet another with your child. Those other people create you--finish you--as much as you create you. When you're gone, the ones you've left behind get to keep the same part of you they always had.”
― The Fireman
― The Fireman
“You know, we might’ve fucked up the planet, sucking out all the oil, melting the ice caps, allowing ska music to flourish, but we made Coca-Cola, so goddamn it, people weren’t all bad.”
― The Fireman
― The Fireman
“Your impulse to protect me conflicts with my need to protect my self-respect. Sorry. Besides. I have this vaguely uneasy feeling you're offering to protect me from you. That's not doing me a kindness -- that's coercion.”
― The Fireman
― The Fireman
“Sometimes I think every man wants to be a writer. They want to invent a world with the perfect imaginary woman, someone they can boss around and undress at will. They can work out their own aggressions with a few fictional rape scenes. Then they can send their fictional surrogate in to save her, a white knight – or a fireman! Someone with all the power and all the agency. Real women, on the other hand, have all these tiresome interests of their own, and won’t follow an outline.”
― The Fireman
― The Fireman
“There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone ALWAYS dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.”
― The Fireman
― The Fireman
Olivia’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Olivia’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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