“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
― The Painted Drum
― The Painted Drum
“I can’t listen to you. I can’t listen to your voice. It’s as though I’d drunk a bottle of anise and fallen asleep wrapped in a quilt of roses. It pulls me along – and I know I’m drowning – but I go on down.”
― Bodas de sangre
― Bodas de sangre
“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― The Secret History
― The Secret History
“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.”
― On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
― On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and I want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”
― The Goldfinch
― The Goldfinch
Clara’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Clara’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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