Alaina
https://www.goodreads.com/alainakafkes
“Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.”
― The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
― The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
“In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.”
― The Story of the Lost Child
― The Story of the Lost Child
“After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”
― A Gentleman in Moscow
― A Gentleman in Moscow
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― The Brothers Karamazov
― The Brothers Karamazov
“I no longer believed that equanimity was either tenable or desirable. It corroded everything inside. I had never met a person with greater equanimity than the former president. But this applied to all of them—to the prosecution and the defense, to the judges and even the other interpreters. They were able to work. They had the right temperament for the job. But at what internal cost?”
― Intimacies
― Intimacies
Alaina’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Alaina’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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