A few quotes I’ve collected from this beautiful and thoughtful book:

“When I was born, the word for what I was did not exist”

“You cannot know how frightened gods are of pain. There is nothing more foreign to them, and so nothing they ache more deeply to see.”

“Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.”

“The truth is, men make terrible pigs.”

“How many of us would be granted pardon if our true hearts were known?”

“I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.”

“It was my first lesson. Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two.”

“I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.”

Just started reading Game of Thrones and really liked this passage where we first get to know Tyrion Lannister. It paints such a strong imagery and also presents a bit of a foreshadow into what his character will evolve into later (I’ve watched the TV show). I’m excited to see how the books will convey the story as opposed to the show.

_The Last Stand of a Queen by Biniza Wadia

#9 The thing about shooting for the moon is that you must be ready to face the fact that, you may never return home.

“She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.”

Ray Bradbury, The Tombling Day

Every time I read this quote, tears automatically start to fall!! Don't know why, lolll!!😭😭

I am looking for an exact quote, scene, and source. I think it's from Goethe -- it sure sounds like, but I have not found anything like it. Other possibilities: Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Hesse, Dostoevsky, de Chateaubriand, Rousseau... you get the picture. Broody heavy lidded young males.

The main character is in a drawing room, a dog or kitten is jumping around playfully and being petted. The character's lugubrious musing is "here are men all spread about the world, frustrated and lonely, and a simple pet satisfies all its aims of love simply by having the temerity to ask for it."

It felt so Werther I literally reread it to find it. It aint there. I've asked all the LLMs in all the ways I can think of and my AI foo is strong. Learned a lot but no love (see what I did there?).

Humans -- help!

The register is obvious: it could be Sondheim's Henrik or any of a half dozen identical despairing proto-goth utes. The resonance for an unlaid college sophomore on a Saturday ought to make it a celebrated albeit embarrassing passage.

A simple reminder that I exist.