A Book Shelf.

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from Anonymous

I exist! It’s just that I post quotes as I’m reading each book, so my posting frequency depends upon how quickly I’m reading a book and/or how many things I find that I like in it.

04/05/12 | 12:28

Underneath your tiny handwriting is a repressed wish. Maybe that’s what your tiny handwriting has been doing all your life, trying to keep your crazy wishes from exploding your life.
How do I know this? Let’s just say that during my travels I’ve become acquainted with interior states that collapse the distance between people. Sometimes, despite how far apart we are physically, I have drawn very close to you, right up into your innermost chamber. I can feel what you’re feeling. From here.

Jeffrey Eugenides — The Marriage Plot

27/04/12 | 10:32

That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

Jeffrey Eugenides — The Marriage Plot

23/04/12 | 11:21

In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

Jeffrey Eugenides — The Marriage Plot

20/04/12 | 01:25

I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race—that rarely do I ever simply estimate it.

Markus Zusak — The Book Thief

18/04/12 | 10:33

She leaned down and looked at his lifeless face and Liesel kissed her best friend, Rudy Steiner, soft and true on his lips. He tasted dusty and sweet. He tasted like regret in the shadows of trees and in the glow of the anarchist’s suit collection. She kissed him long and soft, and when she pulled herself away, she touched his mouth with her fingers. Her hands were trembling, her lips were fleshy, and she leaned in once more, this time losing control and misjudging it. Their teeth collided on the demolished world of Himmel Street.

Markus Zusak — The Book Thief

13/04/12 | 11:39

I’ll never forget the first day in Auschwitz, the first time in Mauthausen. At that second place, as time wore on, I also picked them up from the bottom of the great cliff, when their escapes fell awfully awry. There were broken bodies and dead, sweet hearts. Still, it was better than the gas. Some of them I caught when they were only halfway down. Saved you, I’d think, holding their souls in midair as the rest of their being—their physical shells—plummeted to the earth. All of them were light, like the cases of empty walnuts. Smoky sky in those places. The smell like a stove, but still so cold.

Markus Zusak — The Book Thief

11/04/12 | 11:45

I guess humans like to watch a little destruction. Sand castles, houses of cards, that’s where they begin. Their great skill is their capacity to escalate.

Markus Zusak — The Book Thief

08/04/12 | 02:49

It’s always a delusion when I see what you don’t want me to see.

F. Scott Fitzgerald — Tender is the Night

11/03/12 | 02:16

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald — Tender is the Night