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“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
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“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”
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“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― The Fire Next Time
― The Fire Next Time
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
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“If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”
― The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
― The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The Kindred Spirits
— 300 members
— last activity Sep 23, 2025 07:28AM
Place to meet and talk about anything.
2015: The Year of Reading Women
— 673 members
— last activity Apr 01, 2020 04:01AM
Join us for a year of member-run group reads to make 2015 the year of reading women! Rules Members are free to create author threads by surname if th ...more
Classical music lovers
— 584 members
— last activity Dec 03, 2025 01:54AM
Our fast-growing classical music group is sometimes erudite - and maybe a little eccentric - but we aim never to be exclusive. Classical music is a g ...more
Dalkey Archive Devotees
— 74 members
— last activity Aug 27, 2018 08:18AM
for fans of Flann, S.B., and the best there is in publishing today
Theatre Books and Plays
— 1520 members
— last activity Apr 04, 2026 08:08PM
A room for lovers of theatre, theater books, texts on acting, directing, theory and scripts.
Erik F.’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Erik F.’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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