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If we must hear the truth, let us hear it all. Let us be able to say at the end: this is the price and reward of madness; this is the price and reward of genius.
“That life - whatever else it is - is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― The Goldfinch
― The Goldfinch
“And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to
you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently
as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever
else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That
Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we
have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always
so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway:
wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping
eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise
from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is
a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― The Goldfinch
you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently
as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever
else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That
Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we
have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always
so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway:
wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping
eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise
from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is
a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”
― The Goldfinch
“Who was it that said that coincidence was just God’s way of remaining anonymous?”
― The Goldfinch
― The Goldfinch
“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky - so the space where I exist, and I want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”
― The Goldfinch
― The Goldfinch
“So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
― Letters to a Young Poet
― Letters to a Young Poet
C’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at C’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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Art, Biography, Classics, Fiction, Memoir, Music, Non-fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychology, Religion, Science, Science fiction, and Spirituality
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