“I have said before: It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”
― My Name Is Lucy Barton
― My Name Is Lucy Barton
“And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.”
― My Name Is Lucy Barton
― My Name Is Lucy Barton
“There is that constant judgment in this world: How are we going to make sure we do not feel inferior to another?”
― My Name Is Lucy Barton
― My Name Is Lucy Barton
“Coincidence, on the other hand, is total freedom, our natural destiny. Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don’t know what they are. Coincidence, if you’ll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us.”
― 2666
― 2666
“I followed her, because as I have already said, when I am with my sister I see things from her point of view rather than my own, am compelled to enter her vision, as I used to be compelled to enter her room when we were children, always believing it to be superior to my own. And as we stood out in the street making sure that her car was intact, which of course it was, I became aware of this feeling of having deserted my own life, as once I would desert my room; and I was suddenly filled with the most extraordinary sense of existence as a secret pain, an inner torment it was impossible to share with others, who asked you to attend to them while remaining oblivious to what was inside you, like the mermaid in the fairy story who walks on knives that no one else can see.”
― Outline
― Outline
Chessy’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Chessy’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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