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“After all, what is happiness? Love, they tell me. But love doesn't bring and never has brought happiness. On the contrary, it's a constant state of anxiety, a battlefield; it's sleepless nights, asking ourselves all the time if we're doing the right thing. Real love is composed of ecstasy and agony.”
― The Witch of Portobello
― The Witch of Portobello
“It seemed to him [Otto Kugelblitz] obvious that the human life span runs through the varieties of mental disorder as understood in his day—the solipsism of infancy, the sexual hysterias of adolescence and entry-level adulthood, the paranoia of middle age, the dementia of late life ... all working up to death, which at last turns out to be "sanity.”
― Bleeding Edge
― Bleeding Edge
“The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)”
― The Joke
― The Joke
“You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place
between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting...
It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”
―
between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting...
It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.”
―
“It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their ove its shape.
After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns toward me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story.”
― The Joke
After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns toward me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story.”
― The Joke
Marianne’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Marianne’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
410 books
|
321 friends
313 books
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1,506 friends
205 books
|
376 friends
63 books
|
23 friends
494 books
|
80 friends
207 books
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513 friends
1,071 books
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69 friends
205 books
|
349 friends
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