“Apricot stones contain cyanide,” he replies drily. “The death cap mushroom has a fifty percent fatality rate. Natural does not equal safe. There’s a plant in my garden that if you simply sat under it for ten minutes, you’d be dead.” Job
...more
“People and their dwellings were such a thin dust on the surface of the globe, like invisible specks of bacteria on an orange, and the feeble lights of kebab shops and supermarkets failed utterly to register on the infinities of space above.”
― The Book of Strange New Things
― The Book of Strange New Things
“To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience, It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”
― Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
― Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
“I just wish,” she said, “that this magnificent, stupendous God of yours could give a fuck.”
― The Book of Strange New Things
― The Book of Strange New Things
“Where are you all now? I feel lonely and bereft. Ghosts inhabit this house. When I go into the various rooms I feel overcome with a sense of loss.”
―
―
“He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she mean by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing toward the New Land … who knows what was on his mind? The last words spoken to him by an old friend, perhaps, a person not even remembered in history books …”
― The Book of Strange New Things
― The Book of Strange New Things
Cara’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Cara’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Cara
Lists liked by Cara





























