• 01 — j. sheridan le fanu carmilla
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆
• 02 — frank herbert children of dune
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆
• 03 — aldous huxley brave new world
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

call it the fault of civilization. god isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness.

"but i don't want comfort. i want god, i want poetry, i want real danger, i want freedom, i want goodness. i want sin."

• 04 — raphael montes suicidas
  • ⤹ ★☆☆☆☆
• 05 — anne de marcken it lasts forever and then it's over
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

i know you will not be there in the dunes. except that i will be there. i will be there and through me you will be there. i think, if i am in the place where we were together, then we are together again.

• 06 — virginia woolf orlando
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆
• 07 — haruki murakami kafka on the shore
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆
• 08 — charlotte bronte shirley
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

take the matter as you find it: ask no questions, utter no remonstrances; it is your best wisdom. you expected bread, and you have got a stone: break your teeth on it, and don't shriek because the nerves are martyrized; do not doubt that your mental stomach — if you have such a thing — is strong as an ostrich's; the stone will digest. you held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. never mind; in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob. for the whole remnant of your life, if you survive the test — some, it is said, die under it — you will be stronger, wiser, less sensitive. this you are not aware of, perhaps, at the time, and so cannot borrow courage of that hope. nature, however, as has been intimated, is an excellent friend in such cases, sealing the lips, interdicting utterance, commanding a placid dissimulation — a dissimulation often wearing an easy and gay mien at first, settling down to sorrow and paleness in time, then passing away, and leaving a convenient stoicism, not the less fortifying because it is half-bitter.

there are people who render you as cold as stone when you move near them. there are people who make you feel as if you were in the presence of a hollow, soundless shell; you may strike it, and it will give back no echo; you may search it, and you will find no heart, no soul, no mind. you look for life, and you find only a mechanism; you look for warmth, and you find a void. such people are neither good nor bad; they are simply empty — walking, talking, breathing emptiness.

• 09 — thomas mann the magic mountain
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

• 10 — sarah j. maas a court of thorns and roses
  • ⤹ ★☆☆☆☆
• 11 — unknown beowulf
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆
• 12 — c. g. jung memories, dreams, reflections
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

besides my world there existed another world, a realm like a temple in which anyone who entered was transformed and suddenly overpowered by a vision of the whole cosmos, so that he could only gaze and admire, forgetful of himself. here lived the 'other', who knew god as a hidden, personal, and at the same time universal secret. here nothing separated man from god; indeed, it was as though the human mind gazed upon creation simultaneously with god.

• 13 — franz kafka the castle
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆
• 14 — kahlil gibran the prophet
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

you give but little when you give of your possessions. it is when you give of yourself that you truly give.

• 15 — friedrich nietzsche this spoke zaratustra
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

but wherever i found living things, there heard i also the language of obedience. all living things are obeying things. and this heard i secondly: whatever cannot obey itself, is commanded. such is the nature of living things.

• 16 — emily henry funny story
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆