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All mortal greatness is but disease.

Although the language sometimes turns biblical or nautical, I’m surprised by how accessible Ishmael’s voice is. As for “mortal greatness”? I’m already rooting for the wreck!

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

What an opener! After struggling to engage with my last few reads, this feels like stepping into clear air again. Literature may ruin us, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Melchor’s writing in this novel is brilliant, but I feel I have to bleach my brain now!

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

The darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power or memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

Someone will remember us
I say
even in another time

The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Great houses fade away,
Ultimately replaced by lesser ones.

The same goes for the people who live there.

The story of my life doesn’t exist. Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it’s not true, there was no one.

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

Such a powerful read! I would never have imagined that a book about sales and shopping could be this compelling🛍️
Totally sold on Zola!

There is no single instant on this spinning globe that is not, for millions of individuals, immeasurable by ordinary standards of time: a fragment of eternity forever unrelated to the calendar of the striking clock.

The only real journey would be to travel not towards new landscapes, but with new eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them can see.

My heart skipped a beat - finally coming across this passage ❤ 🩹

For memory is not a copy, always present to our eyes, of the various events of our life, but rather a void from which, every now and then, a present resemblance allows us to recover, to resurrect, dead recollections; but there are also thousands of tiny facts which never fell into this well of potential memories and which we shall never be able to check.

You seek what's nowhere. Turn away, and your
beloved will be lost. It is a shadow
of a reflected likeness that you see.
It isn't real. It came and stays with you,
and it would leave with you—if you could leave.

(Echo and Narcissus)

The one thing you can say about people for sure, is that they'll only free themselves if freedom is in their own interest.

If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing takes some away.

Missing Goodreads and all your wonderful updates and reviews! I hope to spend more time here soon 📖🕊

When we start something new, at first it is very muddy, and clouded. But soon, it becomes a clean stream, whose flow conducts itself quietly, through spontaneous movements.

📞何か新しいことを始めると、最初は濁っている。だが、やがてそれは清流になり、自然な運動の中で静かに営まれていく。

And so no region would lack living beings,
the stars and the forms of gods won heaven’s seat,
the waves became the home of shimmering fish,
earth took the beasts, and buoyant air the birds.

Welcome to life, dear world!
Wishing you a lovely Vernal Equinox Day, everyone 🌸

And of those two ways of living - living in the moment and living outside it - which was more real?

There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.

Smash! 🐺🔥

I can’t believe I haven’t read this before!

We were afraid of the dead because we never could tell when they might show up again.

So it is true after all, not merely
a rule of art:
change your form and you change your nature.
And time does this to us.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice.

Maybe I'm in the right mood, but this feels like an instant favourite.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

Ours was a century of half measures. Every single one of us on this ruined earth exhibited a perfect obedience to our local forces of gravity, daily choosing the path of least resistance, which while entirely and understandably human was at the same time the most barbaric, the most abominable course of action.

Time was passing very slowly and, luckily for them, the alarm clock had long ago stopped working so there wasn’t even the sound of ticking to remind them of time.

Not so much an obsession with accumulating individual objects, then, but rather with everything those objects connected to - everything they held between them and which joined them together.

Heathcliff: Umph!

Yes, everyone in this novel is so grumpy and toxic, welcome to Wuthering Heights! Enjoying the writing so far though. Were you asked to tea?

This is how I imagine Goodreads this week, consuming all our Likes and Comments. Still waiting for their response. Please, report if you have the same issue, happy reading.