Kelly

http://www.shouldacouldawouldabooks.com

Kelly’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (653)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (1068)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
fiction‎ (675)
owned‎ (456)
21st-century‎ (288)
examined-lives‎ (213)
20th-century-postwar-to-late‎ (204)
brit-lit‎ (204)
fantasy-and-scifi‎ (181)
its-the-quiet-ones‎ (164)

20th-century-early-to-mid‎ (146)
history‎ (131)
romantical‎ (129)
worlds-lost-dead-and-dying‎ (113)
great-and-terrible-men‎ (103)
the-continent‎ (102)
grand-opera‎ (101)
identity-crisis‎ (94)
goth-goth-baby‎ (91)
19th-century‎ (89)
woundedsoulsandfragileflowers‎ (87)
melancholia‎ (86)

cultural-meetings‎ (81)
philosophy-theory-criticism‎ (81)
tres-francais‎ (76)
shes-quite-an-original-my-dear‎ (73)
international-affairs‎ (64)
coming-soon-to-a-blog-near-you‎ (61)
grande-dames‎ (61)
forandbecauseofgradschool‎ (57)
mawwiageiswhatbringsustogethertoday‎ (56)
current-affairs-and-politics‎ (46)
favorites‎ (44)
regency‎ (44)

wits-and-fools‎ (44)
theonewithacrushontheprofessor‎ (42)
1500-1700‎ (38)
theatre‎ (37)
did-not-finish-2‎ (33)
history-british‎ (31)
victorian‎ (31)
life-of-a-teacher‎ (29)
vita-virginia-violet-and-kindred‎ (24)
18th-century‎ (23)
truly-dreadful‎ (22)
shakespeare‎ (21)

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“Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to tame it. If you are conscious of something new - thought or feeling, wakening in the depths of your being - do not be in a hurry to let in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness.”
― Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Amiel's Journal

52 likes

“To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.”
― John Cowper Powys

159 likes

“For the spell is older than experience. For the tale is older than the record.”
― Marina Tsvetaeva

41 likes

“Any idiot can face a crisis—it’s day to day living that wears you out.”
― Clifford Odets

66 likes

“Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void.”
― Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

tags: expression, freedom, introversion, isolation, outsider

37 likes

More of Kelly’s quotes…