top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like An Imperial Affliction, which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like betrayal."
Standard
Customized
More
"A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The role of a story was, in the broadest terms, to transpose a single problem into another form. ... It was like a piece of paper bearing the indecipherable text of a magic spell."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman."
Author Name
Personal Development
"And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book."
Author Name
Personal Development
"It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A book may be compared to your neighbour: if it be good it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"We bring the fucking rain Q, not the scattered showers."
Power
"But alas, the world is not a wish-granting factory."
Reality
"Why had Ovid lived in Ancient Rome in 20 BCE23 and not Chicago in 2006 CE? Would Ovid still have been Ovid if he had lived in America? No, he wouldn't have been, because he would have been a Native American or possibly an American Indian or a First Person or an Indigenous Person, and they did not have Latin or any other kind of written language then. So did Ovid matter because he was Ovid or because he lived in Ancient Rome?"
Identity
"You listen to people so that you can imagine them, and you hear all the terrible and wonderful things people do to themselves and to one another, but in the end the listening exposes you even more than it exposes the people you're trying to listen to."
Communication
"It doesn't matter how long we've used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks-at least so far-are fairly limited in their awesomeness."
Technology
"That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without."
Fear
"Nuts, arms, stomachs -- they never hurt. All hurt is brain hurt."
Health
"How wil we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?"
Emotion
"He was gone and did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth."
Forgiveness
"You don't get to have an opinion on whether .999 is equal to 1, for instance. It is equal to 1. People smarter than us have worked hard to figure this stuff out, and we owe it to them and to the universe to respect what they've figured out."
Science
bottom of page