You see, there are some people that one loves, and others that perhaps one would rather be with.
Henrik Ibsen
A Doll’s House
1879
#EdvardMunch #AppleTree #NorwegianLiterature #playwright #theatersky #theatresky #victorian #protofeminism #feminism #desire #imprisonment #expressionism #expressionist
The man that takes up religion for the world will throw away religion for the world.
John Bunyan
The Pilgrim’s Progress
1678
#booksky #firstnovel #englishliterature #allegory #christianity #earlymodernliterature #C17 #dreamliterature #protestantliterature #readbooks #readingisresistance #journey
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
David Hume
The Treatise on Human Nature
1740
#empiricism #skepticism #naturalism #C18 #philosophysky #booksky #philosopher #humannature #sentimentalism #psychology
The victors always spare some village at the end to remind themselves of what they have destroyed.
Anton Shammas
Arabesques
1986
#nakba #palestine #translation #multilingual #booksky #arabic #hebrew #reading
The most profound message of racial segregation may be that the absence of people of color from our lives is no real loss.
Robin DiAngelo
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
2018
#booksky #readingisresistance #jimcrow #antiracism #implicitbias #contacttheory
I had the sense that the deeper meaning of the story was in the gaps.
Edith Wharton
Ethan Frome
1911
#winterreading #winterbooks #winterreads #snowday #adultery #romance #newengland #novella #booksky #readersky #lacuna
She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.
Gustave Flaubert
Madame Bovary
1857
#RealTalk #FrenchLiterature #RealistNovel #19CNovel #19CLiterature #Luxury #Adultery #Escapism #Obscenity #ObsenityTrial #Arsenic #Ennui
Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security & peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body & soul completely in its healing.
DH Lawrence
Sons & Lovers
1913
#codependence
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
Anne Lamott
Bird by Bird
1994
#WritingAdvice #Memoir #Booksky #AmWriting #CreativeNonfiction
Il est rare que la vérité rattrape le terrain purdu sur la légende.
[it is rare that the truth catches up with the ground lost to legend]
Stefan Zweig
Amerigo
1942
#cartography #booksky #cartographer #historicalerror #vespucci #legacy #legend #ComedyOfErrors #GermanLiterature #FrenchTranslation
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest…
Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar
1963
#booksky #pocketmirror #ghostship
“A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds.”
JRR Tolkien
The Hobbit
1937
So make friends with danger (or chili spiced sipping chocolate)
#booksky #newmexico #sippingchocolate #newmexicohumanities #humanities #fairies #fairyland #pueblo #chilis #cacao #mesoamerica #Oaxaca #porcelain #cocoa #read
Like it or not, pregnancy has a plot, a story.
Jazmina Barrera
Linea Nigra
2022
#booksky #bookcover #ThreeActPlay #spanishliterature #childbearing #earthquakes #eclipses #lactation #LowieHollowell #CreativeLabor #memoir #manifesto
If change is to come, it will have to come from the margins.
Wendell Berry
The Unsettling of America
1977
#booksky #culture #agriculture #environmentalism #climatecrisis #labor #pastoral
The sky isn’t more beautiful if you have perfect skin. Music doesn’t sound more interesting if you have a six-pack. Dogs aren’t better company if you’re famous. P izza tastes good regardless of your job title.
Matt Haig
The Comfort Book
2021
#PeanutButterToast #booksky #hope #depression #marmalade
The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.
Fragments d’un discours amoureux
(A Lover's Discourse)
Roland Barthes
1977
#YourLoveIsMyDrug #booksky #readingsky #FrenchTheory #FatalAttraction
As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.
Stacy Schiff
Cleopatra: A Life
2010
#booksky #empress #pharaoh #thepastisfemale #egypt #africa #romanempire #reading #readingisresistance
The quality you most admire in a man? Courage moral and physical: 'anima'—the ability to think like a woman. Also a sense of the absurd.
Christopher Hitchens
Hitch-22
2010
#booksky #anima #absurd #womenaretooemotional #journalist
There on the horse rode Power, through the gateway of triumphal entries, with dazzling features, but graven as in stone. The Power which transcends us and whose hooves we kiss.
Heinrich Mann
The Loyal Subject/Man of Straw
1918
#booksky #militarism #commercialism #germany #corruptsociety #reading
It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
1908
#booksky #existentialcrisis #existentialism #satan
Flowers, by themselves, fall.
Water too runs alone.
One shared longing,
Parted between two.
Unrelenting, it falls
from the brows, only to rise
in the heart.
Li Qingzhao
Trans. Wendy Chen
The Magpie at Night
2025
#booksky #poetryintranslation #songdynasty #chineseliterature #chinesepoetry #poem
“I identify always with Aeneas, the Trojan refugee who desperately tries to fulfill his destiny in a world that holds no place for him.”
Marie Benedict
Victoria Christopher Murray
The Personal Librarian
2021
#booksky #passing #segregation #libraryofcongress #blacklibrarian #manuscript #civilrights
They move the cafe out to the back so anyone who wants a drink or a snack has to traipse all the way through the store. And naturally, on their way there—human nature being what it is—they’ll pick up a little something extra.
Nicola Barker
Darkmans
2007
#consumerism #booksky #manbooker #shortlist
Blood flowed in Bluebeard’s house,—in the slaughterhouses,—in the amphitheaters, where God’s seal turned the windows livid. Blood and milk flowed.
John Ashbery translating Arthur #Rimbaud
Illuminations
2011
#poetryintranslation #booksky #poetrymonth #prosepoem #poetsky #reading #resistance
There are no reasons. She is obliged to be who she is. We all are. Reasons are in books.
Philip Roth
American Pastoral
1998
#booksky #pulitzerprize #pulitzer #america #americandream #1968 #reading #readingisresistance
If you are alive, there is hope for a better day and something good to happen. If there is nothing good left in the destiny of a person, he or she will die.
Ishmael Beah
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
1997
#booksky #childhood #resilience #sierraleone #reading #humanrights #resistance
…tightening the rope until there was no more resistance. So that’s what it was to kill.
Pilar Quintana
The Bitch
2017
#booksky #dogs #colombia #motherhood #love #violence #perimenopause #menopause #BibliotecaDeNarrativaPrize #translation #shelterdog #puppy #pacific #reading #spanish #literature
Everyone at some point in their lives should have a long great love affair with a magnificent lunatic.
Lorrie Moore
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home
2023
#booksky #death #meditation #reality #grief #grieving #haunted #ghoststory #ghosts #novelsky #bronx #reading #readingisresistance #thepast
So self-acceptance does not mean self-admiration or even self-liking at every moment of our lives, but tolerance for all our emotions, including those that make us feel uncomfortable.
Gabor Maté
Scattered Minds
1999
#booksky #adhd #audhd #attentiondeficit #uncomfortablefeelings #selftolerance
I see the long years of our marriage ahead like a great spacious welcoming firelit room…I want to show you off. I want to wave you around in pride.
According to Mark
Penelope Lively
1984
#booksky #love #affair #romance #bookerprize #biography #biographer #england #mystery #reading #pride #lovewins
