Yo-ho! If you’re reading this, we made it to the end of the year! What an accomplishment it is to be alive 🥳
Just like last year, I’ve categorized all my 2024 reads into categories (includes at least one quote from each book). Hopefully you get enough of a teaser to pick up a book for yourself!
For 2025, I’m going to try something new…something très risqué…eliminate reading goals! Although these metaphorical goalposts have guided me to read more and develop a great habit I think it’s time to drop the training wheels and see what happens when I let go of expectations and just enjoy things that make me happy 🙂
If you’re also on Goodreads please be my friend 🥺 add me here
PS. since we’re in the last weeks of December, I may be adding a book or two to this post before the end of the year!
To Connect is to Understand and to Misunderstand 👬
We live in this place, in this world, where we can share our words but not our thoughts.
― Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs
To speak is to stumble, to hesitate, to detour and hit dead ends. To listen is straightforward. You can always just listen.
–Yu Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station
I don’t give you advice. I just-I-I think that what I’m really doing is waiting. waiting perhaps for you to give yourself advice, I don’t know.
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
But as the pages mounted, I felt something else that surprised me: sympathy for the man who did those things to me. Would he, my friend not also be tortured by the things he had done to me.
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
Understanding was always a mistake-she preferred the largesse, so wide and free and without mistakes, of not-understanding. It was bad, but at least you knew you were in the full human condition.
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
On Beauty 💄
Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Being beautiful, was that for men?
Yes. Some women say that it is for ourselves. What on earth can we do with it? I could have loved myself whether I was hunchbacked or lame, but to be loved by others, you had to be beautiful.
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who have Never Known Men
Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Thoughts to snack on 💭
To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo
When it came to love, we found ourselves confronting a foreign language. We did not know how to estimate or value things that were free. The things that were free–sex, conversation, the smell of grass in summer-unsettled us. We sought to commodify them and create outcomes from them. But they seemed to belong to everybody: we couldn’t keep them for ourselves.
― Rachel Cusk, Parade
How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch
Science sometimes sees itself as impersonal, as “pure thought’, independent of its historical and human origins. It is often taught as if this were the case. But science is a human enterprise through and through, an organic, evolving, human growth, with sudden spurts and arrests, and strange deviations, too. It grows out of its past but never outgrows it, any more than we outgrow our childhoods.
― Oliver Sacks, Everything in its Place
… thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements as thought they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living–as ‘thought fragments,” as something “rich and strange,” and perhaps even as everlasting Urphanomene.
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Any physical theory is always provisional, in the sense that it is only a hypothesis: you can never prove it. No matter how many times the results of experiments agree with some theory, you can never be sure that the next time the result will not contradict the theory.
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Even short lives are complex and rich. Even dead children are full of contradictions and flaws and mysteries that will never be fully understood or solved.
― Eliza Clark, Penance
Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.
― Rachel Cusk, Outline
Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful?
that no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.
― Bhagavad Gita
Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world
― Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
dogs deserve the world 🐶
Why is a dog so free? Because he’s the living mystery that doesn’t ask itself questions.
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
And it is exceedingly short, his galloping life. Dogs die so soon. I have my stories of that grief, no doubt many of you do also. It is almost a failure of will, a failure of love, to let them grow old—or so it feels. We would do anything to keep them with us, and to keep them young. The one gift we cannot give.
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs
What would the world be like without music or rivers or the green and tender grass?
What would this world be like without dogs?
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs
On Longing & Loneliness 😢
I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than anyone of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets
I miss you more than I remember you.
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What’s so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak states, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inward from the world at large?
― Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
Loneliness… is when nothing will stick to you, when nothing will thrive around you, when you start to think that you kill things just by being there.
― Rachel Cusk, Transit
Let’s stay indoors, the world is on fire 🔥
We’ve built cathedrals, and stayed outside because the cathedrals we ourselves built, we’re afraid they’re traps. We haven’t surrendered to ourselves because that would be the start of a long life and we’re afraid of that. We’ve avoided falling to our knees in front of the first one of us who says, out of love: you’re afraid.
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
There’s so much pain everywhere, and we just close our eyes to it. The truth is we’re all scared. We’re terrified of each other.
― Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient
Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men.
Jokes, my insides are just on fire (halp)
If we could light up the room with pain,
we’d be such a glorious fire.
― Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things
I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
Under the seams runs the pain.
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red
Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented?
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place
Honestly, TMI
Having all the information in the world at our fingertips doesn’t make it easier to communicate: it makes it harder.
― Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Storytelling with Data
The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
Sorry, readers only 📚
Is there anything better than iced coffee and a bookstore on a sunny day? I mean, aside from hot coffee and a bookstore on a rainy day.
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers
Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.
― John Williams, Stoner
You could tell a lot about a man by the books he keeps – his tastes, his interest, his habits.
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it’s like to be inside another person’s head. You are simulating a social situation. You are imagining other people and their experiences in a deep and complex way. So maybe, he said, if you read a lot of novels, you will become better at actually understanding other people off the page. Perhaps fiction is a kind of empathy gym, boosting your ability to empathize with other people—which is one of the most rich and precious forms of focus we have. Together, they decided to begin to study this question scientifically.
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus
It is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Love, Actually 💞
But isn’t that what allowing yourself be loved is all about – letting something greater than fear into your life?
― Ronan Hession, Panenka
No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt, she thought, go running in the other direction, depend on people for everything, allow them to depend on you, why not.
― Sally Rooney, Normal People
You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person.
― Rachel Cusk, Kudos
Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like … like everything will be okay.
― Emily Henry, Book Lovers
Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone who can understand what we are saying in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved.
― Alain de Botton, Essays in Love
He soothed the places I hadn’t known needed soothing, seemed perfectly willing to embrace the parts of me that were wanton, unsettled, unfinished, and contradictory. Together we had engaged life as two forks eating off one plate. Ready to listen, to love, to look into the darkness and see a thin filament of the moon.
― Tembi Locke, From Scratch
Could love be giving your own solitude to another? Because that’s the ultimate thing you can give yourself.
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
Step on m[y heart] 💔
There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.
― Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
I mean they don’t seem able to love us just the way we are. They don’t seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as they love us, and most of the time more.
― J.D. Salinger, Nine Stories
Can you love my brain even when it is small? When it is malevolent? When it is violent? Can you love it even when it does not love me?”
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether
To love is to suffer and there can be no love otherwise.
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Sometimes you need people to be perfect and they can’t be and you hate them forever for not being even though it isn’t their fault and it’s not yours either. You just needed something they didn’t have in them to give you.
― Sally Rooney, Intermezzo
They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Some sunshine for the darker days 🌞
You are brilliant. Tell your mind to be kind to you today.
― Olivie Blake, Alone with You in the Ether
There’s just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though…these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours
Look, we are not unspectacular things. we’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
― Ada Limon, The Carrying
Time is a concept ⏰
The increase of disorder or entropy is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others.
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who have Never Known Men
There’s a certain point in life at which you realise it’s no longer interesting that time goes forward – or rather, that its forward-going-ness has been the central plank of life’s illusion, and that while you were waiting to see what was going to happen next, you were steadily being robbed of all you had. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal – or can be.
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place
Time is just common, it’s like water for a fish. Everybody’s in this water, nobody gets out of it, or if he does the same thing happens to him that happens to the fish, he dies. And you know what happens in this water, time? The big fish eat the little fish. that’s all. The big fish eat the little fish and the ocean doesn’t care.
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
I’m just a girl 👧
Who knew it would be hard to live to thirty-two?
― Ada Limon, Sharks in the River
I cannot BELIEVE I FINALLY made it to TORONTO ONTARIO
AND – with a little elbow grease, I have finally made myself a HOME
― Walter Scott, The Wendy Award
I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea.
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
For the literary geeks 🤓
That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.
― R.F. Kuang, Babel
…no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife–which would not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living–the original undergoes a change
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
I write poetry not because I’m a poet but to exercise my soul, it’s man’s most profound exercise…it’s more like research into how to think.
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
Passages that are worth a film adaptation (please don’t ruin it) 📝
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. 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, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time- believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of. Maybe we’ll be the opposite of buffaloes. We’ll grow wings and spill over the cliff as a generation of monarchs, heading home.
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
What she really wants to know is: Is it raining in Florence tonight? Has the thunder of autumn begun? I Papa swimming in the Arno? Are the starlings swarming above the piazza at the day’s end? Does the light still slant into my chamber in the evening, just before it disappears below the city’s roofs? Do you miss me? Even a little? Does anyone ever go and stand before my portrait?
― Maggie O’Farrell, The Marriage Portrait
He begins to play, and for a moment Sophia fully and truly thinks she will die. The sound of it is a knife, if a knife could kiss, and the kiss could turn the color of morning. There is no sense to the song. It crashes and whispers and cajoles and weeps and admonishes and commands all at once, without progression from one feeling to the next. Yet it contains a perfection that is twin to pain.
― Catherynne M. Valente, Comfort Me with Apples
Twice a day the sea rises over the marsh and fills its creeks and crevices and bears away–or so I like to think of it–the evidence of its thoughts. I have walked on the marsh every day for these past years and it’s never looked like the same place twice. they’re always trying to paint it, of course, but what they end up painting is the content of their own mind–they try to find drama or a story or a point of exception in it, when those things can only ever be incidental to its character.
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place
In my mind, I built stairways. At the end of the stairways, I imagined rooms. These were high, airy places with big windows and a cool breeze moving through. I imagined one room opening brightly onto another room until I’d built a house, a place with hallways and more staircases. I built many houses, one after another, and those gave rise to a city — a calm, sparkling city near the ocean, a place like Vancouver. I put myself there, and that’s where I lived, in the wide-open sky of my mind. I made friends and read books and went running on a footpath in a jewel-green park along the harbour. I ate pancakes drizzled in syrup and took baths and watched sunlight pour through trees. This wasn’t longing, and it wasn’t insanity. It was relief. It got me through.
― Amanda Lindhout, A House in the Sky
My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away.
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, convergingin and parallel times. This web of time-the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries-embrace every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate.
― Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones
One after another in the wind, they trod slowly out of the frames, the sea spreading beyond the beach, spilling over into the sky, an image with no lines, only the edges of the page to frame it. A place, but not a place. A place taking shape in the moment of conception and then dissolving. A threshold, a passage, where the falling snow joins the spray, where snowflakes divide to evaporate or meet the sea.
― Elisa Shua Dusapin, Winter in Sokcho
When you’re lost and need some direction 🗺
You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you’re trying to decide what to do.
― John Williams, Stoner
If we treated each moment as though it were a permanent condition, a place where we might find ourselves compelled to remain forever, how differently most of us would choose the things that moment contains! It may be that the happiest people are those who broadly adhere to this principle, who don’t borrow against the moment, but instead invest it with what could acceptable continue into all moments without causing or receiving damage and destruction.
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place
…to each was given days and chances which wouldn’t come back around. And wasn’t it sweet to be where you were and let it remind you of the past for once, despite the upset, instead of always looking on into the mechanics of the days and the trouble ahead, which might never come.
― Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These
When you really want love, you will find it waiting for you.
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
…one of the things I’ve learned is that we ought to live despite. Despite, we should eat. Despite, we should love. Despite we should die. It’s even often this despite that spurs us on.
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
For 2025 🎊
Insist on your joy.
― Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch
“How do you know when a story is done?”
“My character reaches a point when I know he has a life of his own. I can let him go.”
― Elisa Shua Dusapin, Winter in Sokcho
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
― Johann Hari, Stolen Focus
…she noticed that she was opening her hands and her heart but that she could do so without danger! I’m not losing anything! I’m finally giving myself and what happens when I’m giving myself is that I receive, receive.
― Clarice Lispector, An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures
Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.
― David Nicholls, One Day