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The Obelisk Gate
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by N.K. Jemisin (Goodreads Author)
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Dec 23, 2025 09:40AM

 
Emma
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Jan 29, 2024 11:34PM

 
Women Who Run Wit...
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See all 9 books that Emily is reading…
Book cover for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it ...more
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Neil Gaiman
“There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, this skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted distended caricature of a human child? And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?

We draw our lines around these moments of pain, remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us. They are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous layer to let them slip, pearllike, from our souls without real pain.

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.

A life that is, like any other, unlike any other.

And the simple truth is this: There was a girl, and her uncle sold her.”
Neil Gaiman, American Gods

Jane Austen
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Sigmund Freud
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
Sigmund Freud

Tom Robbins
“To achieve the impossible, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.”
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

Joan Didion
“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves--there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.”
Joan Didion

93073 The Penguin Press — 1453 members — last activity Mar 28, 2017 12:09PM
Welcome to our Goodreads Group for The Penguin Press! We like to say that we publish "ideas that matter and storytelling that lasts," and some of our ...more
141678 Wellesley Underground Readers — 63 members — last activity Mar 21, 2017 08:12PM
A group for all those readers who love the alternative alumnae magazine, Wellesley Underground! http://wellesleyunderground.com/ 1. Are you a Wellesl ...more
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