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“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”
― The Robber Bride
― The Robber Bride
“I had the epiphany that laughter was light, and light was laughter, and that this was the secret of the universe.”
― The Goldfinch
― The Goldfinch
“I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions.”
― The Waves
― The Waves
“--and yet, whenever he started with the questions I froze stiff, as if I'd been pushed onstage in a play where I didn't know the lines.”
― The Goldfinch
― The Goldfinch
“Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.”
― The Rehearsal
― The Rehearsal
Gemma’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Gemma’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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