Patty > Recent Status Updates

From Mary Karr’s intro to The Waste Land: “Read it first for joy. Shut up your head’s claptrap and open yourself to fall in love with it. Treat it like a first date, which should begin with ignorance but also with hope. Only if you fall in love do you make a study of the beloved, for only passion lets us inquire into other people’s mysteries with the vitality borne of conviction.”

[as a neurosurgeon] “You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”

Beautifully written. “The root of ‘disaster’ means a star coming apart, and no image expresses better the look in a patient’s eyes when hearing a neurosurgeon’s diagnosis.”

“These dream images taught me that the happiness of being alive could never be separated from the pleasures of seeing this world.”

“After all, isn’t the purpose of this novel, or of a museum, for that matter, to relate our memories with such sincerity as to transform individual happiness into a happiness all can share?”

“This is the land of despair and poetry but there is nobody to sing.”

"what woman dreams light must face the sun dreams fierce and blinding dreams waiting for evening dreams golden rams a vestige of sun you can love and live"

"Having lost the language of others [is] is the term Clarice used for madness..." "... to be human is to have a language."

"Having lost the language of others [is] is the term Clarice used for madness..." "... to be human is to have a language."

"Having lost the language of others [is] is the term Clarice used for madness..." "... and to be human is to have a language."

This book is so !! good! I love it. Benjamin Moser is a brilliant biographer

Really enjoying this still, I loved chapter 10; Robert Walser writes so well about being alive and at a loss against the painful/ confusing qualities of feelings, like how quickly and kaleidoscopically they can change...

So happily surprised by how much I like this book so far! Especially considering how lukewarm I feel about Jakob Von Gunten... So far reminds me a bit of The Waves by the Virginia Woolf and Bruno Schulz and some Calvino.

I'm in love. One of the best books I've ever read.

Immersive & interesting, really enjoying this so far

Really weird and schizophrenic and headache-inducing... I half-agree with both the positive and negative reviews on here which basically makes my position on this book so far = ??????? Oh my god...

"It will be a city and in this city there will be a street, continued the princess, we will play cards, I will lose my eyes, in the mirror it will be Sunday." the last line is from Corona by Celan! "I will lose my eyes" is very Celan too -- now that I think about it, I remember reading in (a review of) their letters to each other that Corona was her favorite poem by him.