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I'm stunned at how great this book is.

My parents take turns being angry and depressed like it's a chore wheel taped to the fridge.

A significant portion of all possible worlds, real or imagined, is touched on or explored in the earth’s total accumulation of books.

The imagined lords it over the actual – no paradox or mystery there. Many religious believers do not want their God depicted or described. Happiness is ours if we do not have to learn how our electronic machines work. The characters we cherish in fiction do not exist...Living out our lives within unexamined or contradictory assumptions, we inhabit a fog of dreams and seem to need them.

It’s true most superheroes have funny names. But they have to come up with these names by themselves. Think about how hard it is. Try it, right now: boil down your personality and abilities to a single phrase or image. If you can do that, you’re probably a superhero already.

Bucharest is not a city but a state of the spirit, a deep sigh, a pathetic and pointless cry. It is like old people who are nothing more than walking wounds, clots of nostalgia, like dry blood on scraped skin.

We all secrete, as we live, poems and pictures, ideas and hope, glistening palaces of music and faith, shells which begin by protecting our soft abdomen but after our disappearance live in the golden air of pure forms.

In very simple words, I described to her how man can become a grave for the unburied dead.

I had not been able to understand for a long time what in the world God had done to deserve man.

I learned early that the safest place can be the most dangerous. And that even when it isn’t, I make it so.

That’s why people used books to say important things, because a book assumes an absence, on one side or the other: while it is being written, the reader is missing. While it is being read, the writer is missing. The disgust and abjection that come from putting the judge face-to-face with the condemned thus disappear.

I’d like to shout down through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend. Do not trust the keyboard and screen. If you do, we’ll know everything.

Gorillas and gods don't know that they will one day die. Only we do.

The Adirondack chair was invented for tuberculosis patients, allowing them to rest outdoors without needing their beds wheeled outside.

At the height of the sanitarium, there were nearly as many beds to treat tuberculosis patients as there were hospital beds for all other illnesses combined.

People who are treated as less than fully human by the social order are more susceptible to tuberculosis. But it's not because of their moral codes or choices or genetics; it's because they are treated as less than fully human by the social order.

"About half of all humans ever born died before the age of five."

The most accurate accounts, estimated by native chroniclers in the years directly following the conquest, suggest that more than 200,000 Aztecs fell during the siege of Tenochtitlán, as well as 30,000 Tlaxcalans. Even by the most conservative estimates, the battle for the Aztec empire ranks, in terms of human life, as the costliest single battle in history.

Could one of my Goodreads librarian friends please add the cover to this book? Thank you!

https://flic.kr/p/2rPK8Mw

The poetic establishment has co-opted contradiction.
And the poetic establishment has not co-opted contradiction.
Are these poems just cumbersome or
are these poems a critique of cumbersomeness?

“A man’s mind is a strange creature for a man to have to live with

It was as if their memory, the memory of all the Corregidora women, was her memory too, as strong with her as her own private memory, or almost as strong.

80% of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border are raped on the way. The situation is so common that most of them take contraceptive precautions as they begin the journey north.

"In Nyamata, the displaced Tutsis’ shadow, their true shadow, the shadow that never left them, that ignored the sun’s course through the sky, that clung to them even deep in the night, was fear."

Wow. Now that is a short story opening sentence that grabs attention.