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7,794 books
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49,753 voters
“But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future.”
― The Mirror & the Light
― The Mirror & the Light
“I am, a stride at a time”
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“Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
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“He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.”
― Stoner
― Stoner
“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of “generalization” of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.”
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War and Peace, 2009
— 3 members
— last activity Sep 04, 2009 11:17AM
This is a reading group to discuss Tolstoy's War and Peace. The goal is to complete the book by September of 2009. To do that, we have set dates to co ...more
Monks of the Screw / F.I.G.H.T. C.L.U.B.
— 5 members
— last activity May 05, 2025 12:18PM
When Saint Patrick this order established, He called us the Monks of the Screw Good rules he revealed to our Abbot To guide us in what we should do; B ...more
Penumbras of Uncertainty
— 6 members
— last activity Nov 08, 2020 03:12PM
Philosophy group in Sandy, UT A discussion of Second Things.
David’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at David’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
109 books
|
3,092 friends
1,292 books
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75 friends
643 books
|
5 friends
1,933 books
|
248 friends
712 books
|
74 friends
307 books
|
41 friends
882 books
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1,747 friends
418 books
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17 friends
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Favorite Genres
Art, Book Club, Classics, Fiction, History, Memoir, Non-fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Politics, Psychology, and Religion
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