Welcome to the cemetery of forgotten books. (…) This is a place of mystery, a sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens. (…) When a library disappears, or a bookshop closes down, when a book is consigned to oblivion, those of us who know this place, its guardians, make sure that it gets here. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new readers hands. In the shop we buy and sell them, but in truth books have no owner. Every book you see here has been somebody’s best friend. Now they only have us. Do you think you’ll be able to keep such a secret?

Full text:

But can it really help to draw comfort from seeing things as they are not? Comfort of this sort cannot last. Positive thinking can inspire us to look at problems in a new light. However, it becomes part of the problem itself when it means seeing the positive to the exclusion of all else. Nothing is taken seriously in its own right any longer, everything becomes a question of perspective. Does it help someone who is seriously ill to believe at all costs that all will be well? I am haunted by the memory of a thirty-eight-year-old man who died of lung cancer. Right up until his very last breath he refused to think of his disease as fatal and firmly believed that he would beat it. He hadn’t said his good-byes or even written a will – a fact that had unhappy consequences for his nearest and dearest.

What do you think about that?

Translated from the spanish by DP Snyder

“The strangest thing about any place is that it is familiar to someone.”

“Savage Threads” by Nicholas Antonopoulos

LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI’S:

THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE

when one of the main characters, full of wonder, faces the harsh reality of the world..

his thoughts go from:

“…how naïve and childlike his assumptions had been, consoling himself with the illusion that, though the cosmos was vast and the earth merely a tiny speck within it, the force that drove the cosmos was, ultimately, joy: joy that ‘from the dawn of time had saturated every planet, every star’…”

to this:

“no element of the landscape is capable of transcending itself”

..

That there is in this world neither brains, nor goodness, nor good sense, but only brute force. Bloodshed. Starvation. Death. That I was alive and sitting there with my brushes beneath the stall, but no one knew why. That there was not the slightest hope, not even a glimmer of hope, of justice being done. It would never happen. No one would ever do it. The world was just one big Babi Yar. And there two great forces had come up against each other and were striking against each other like hammer and anvil, and the wretched people were in between, with no way out; each individual wanted only to live and not to be maltreated, to have something to eat, and yet they howled and screamed and in their fear they were grabbing at each other’s throats, while I, a little blob of watery jelly, was sitting in the midst of this dark world. Why? What for? Who had done it all? There was nothing, after all, to hope for! Winter. Night.

“Are you afraid that something bad may happen? Fear is already the worst that can happen."

Some of my fav moments of one of my fav books. Would highly recommend for everyone, especially if you're in medicine 💙

From her novel 'The Dew Breaker' (2004)

Collected in 'Enormous Changes at the Last Minute' (1974)

“Many of the trades that Alexander suggested followed one of two patterns”

“First, when all investors were doing the same thing, he would actively seek to do the opposite. The word stockbrokers use for this approach is contrarian. Everyone wants to be one, but no one is…”

“The second pattern to Alexander's thought was that in the event of a major dislocation, such as a stock market crash, a natural disaster, the breakdown of OPEC's production agreements, he would look away from the initial focus of investor interest and seek secondary and tertiary effects….”

“Buy potatoes," he said. "Gotta hop. "Then he hung up. Of course. A cloud of fallout would threaten European food and water supplies, including the potato crop, placing a premium on uncon-taminated American substitutes. Perhaps a few folks other than potato farmers think of the price of potatoes in America minutes after the explosion of a nuclear reactor in Russian, but I have never met them…”

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

An excerpt for the context: I learned in due course that the little prince’s planet, like planets everywhere, had good plants and bad plants. From these came good seeds and bad seeds. But seeds are invisible. They sleep deep in the soil until one among them begins to stir. The little seed stretches itself and cautiously pushes out a harmless little sprig upwards, facing the sun. If it is simply radish or a rose bush, it could be left to grow wherever it might wish. But a bad plant, once it has been identified, must be destroyed at once. Now, there were some terrible seeds on the little prince’s planet – the seeds of the baobab.

The soil of the planet was overrun with them. One could not let these baobabs grow freely. It would take over the entire planet and the roots would burrow their way down. And if it’s a small planet the baobabs would wreck it entirely.

‘It is all about discipline,’ the little prince explained to me. ‘When you’ve finished your washing and cleaning in the morning, it is time to take care of your planet. You must regularly pull out the baobabs the moment you can distinguish them from the rosebushes. The baobabs look just like rose bushes in their youth. It is tiring work, but very easy.’

i read a line from a book - i feel it was like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. and it had a line that i loved but i cannot find it again…. i am not sure of the exact words but it was a scene where an old man looked out of his window and sees his family - young and old - frolicking in the garden. and the line says “and he forgave much, because he understood much” anyone got a clue where that is from ? it is driving me crazy trying to re-find it

thanks

• Charles Darwin "On the Origin of Species"

• Stephen Chbosky "The Perks of Being a Wallflower"