"She was only suffering from her love, and felt her soul abandoning her through that recollection, as wounded men, dying, feel their existence departing from them through their bleeding wound."

~ Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (transl. W. Blaydes)

"That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are."

"The Catcher In The Rye" by J. D. Salinger

Evgenij Onegin, A. S. Puškin, 1833

Dante and Beatrice, Salvatore Postiglione (1861-1906)

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future.  Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

"He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ."

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera, 1985

Love is nothing if not a catastrophe, one that makes me second-guess gravity, history, the limits of my own person. Love is, might be, feels like, a kind of fairy tale too--one that can begin only once the story we thought we knew blows apart.

Sarah Cypher, The Skin and Its Girl

here’s the thing: jane eyre is important to me as a story and I think it has its own power but people who act like it is not also and at the same time insane melodrama are befuddling to me

— serena crane, tough

*opens video of someone explaining and defining a list of terms and the difference between them* "i've heard this... but i've also heard people saying it's not true... i'm not sure... that's what i've been told..." *closes the video*

~ Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (transl. by W. Blaydes)

- Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

love how this all went from a “this idiot hasn’t seen goncharov” bit to a full-on co-operative writing project

The mimetic theory of art is simply far too crude. A book is a “portrayal”; it “depicts,” it “paints a picture”; the artist is a “spokesman.” The great realist tradition of the novel does not need to be defended in these terms.

Susan Sontag, "The Literary Criticism of Georg Lukács"

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

— Gabriel Garcia Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967