“There is, Tarats believes, a kind of inevitability to empire unchecked.”

Well, that was deeply unsettling.

“Things never stop going wrong. Life isn‘t about waiting for peace to arrive, it‘s about learning to thrive in the midst of war. There‘s always another one on the way.”

“It had taken a bit of thinking outside the box, but that‘s something I‘m getting better at every day, although I really can‘t take much credit for the improvement. It‘s easy to think outside the box when life has dropped a two-ton elephant on yours. What is that box anyway but the beliefs we choose to hold about the world that make us feel safe?”

“Omission or commission—the end result is the same.”

“We should be ashamed. But we aren‘t. We never are. It is our duty, you see, our destiny. We‘ll make any excuse that let‘s us believe we were righteous when we crushed our enemies underfoot.”

“Except real evil isn‘t a demon or a rogue wizard. Real evil is an empire like Quur, a society that feeds on its poor and its oppressed like a mother eating her own children. Demons and monsters are obvious; we‘ll always band together to fight them off. But real evil, insidious evil, is what let‘s us just walk away from another person‘s pain and say, well that‘s none of my business.”

“This was a tree to hold up the whole world, the sort of place where Galava must live, if any place were consecrated to her. It seemed ageless and immortal, a tree that had always and would always exist. Naturally, we were setting it on fire.”

“Truth and evil are not opposed concepts.”
-pg 214

“She set herself a new goal, then: to be allowed to braid her hair younger than anybody ever. She did not really think the Women‘s Circle would allow it, but a goal that was easy was no goal at all.”

“‘Extinction is the natural escalation of this war,‘ Leshwi whispered. ‘If you forget why you are fighting, then victory itself becomes the goal. The longer we fight, the more detached we become. Both from our own minds, and from our original Passions.‘”

“Being a human was about making sense of chaos, finding meaning among the random elements of the world.”

“I cannot say, Mishim said. To be mortal is to be flawed; it is not right to expect perfection of you.”

“He didn‘t believe in heaven or hell…If the world was going to be a better place, it wouldn‘t be because of some divine being, but because of the daily effort of individuals. In real ways, the future of humanity was built by the small actions of millions of everyday folks, and it could be torn down the same way.”

Mellifluous. It's a shame that I have not read Allende before, but I'm grateful that I've discovered her now. A Long Petal of the Sea is beautifully written, woven, and winding, through incredible circumstances that nonetheless closely mimic the experience of many people exiled from Spain, and then subsequently from Chile. Highly recommend.

"Listen, Ingrid, the most important events, the ones that determine our fate, are almost always completely beyond our control."

"Entropy is the natural law of the universe, everything tends toward disorder, to break down, to disperse. People get lost: look how many vanished during the Retreat; feelings fade, and forgetfulness slips into lives like mist. It takes heroic willpower just to keep everything in place. Those are a refugee's forebodings...No, they're the forebodings of someone in love, Victor corrected her."

"Reason is on our side, but that won't help stave off defeat."

Deeply unsettling, much like The Silent Patient, which I read about a week or so ago. Michaelides is an excellent story teller, and the traumatic twists in his two novels are as demented as trauma itself.

Thought provoking, funny, ironic, and humbling.

A fabulous read.

I don't normally read or enjoy romance novels, but the Netflix adaptation was fun and engaging, especially in view of the casting choices, so I borrowed The Duke and I from my MIL. I am glad I did! The prose was light, smart, and just as engaging as the show, which I think captured the essence of the characters exceptionally well. A fun and easy read ❤.

Possibly the apex of the weirdest yet most eloquent novels I've yet read. Multiple aspects of this book are fascinating, and I will most likely reread it several more times in order to fully ingest the whole thing.

Excellently researched and written. On a level with In Cold Blood.

..............Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill those beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades. Only time would tell."

2/2

"I was even beginning to wonder if the invention of a worldwide social network was actually the 'Great Filter' that theoretically caused all technological civilizations to go extinct, instead of nuclear weapons or climate change.............."

1/2

"Whether people were really Bornded from Ickabogs, I cannot tell you. Perhaps we go through a kind of Bornding when we change, for better or for worse. All I know is that countries, like Ickabogs, can be made gentle by kindness, which is why the kingdom of Cornucopia lived happily ever after."
--JK Rowling in The Ickabog

I think we could all use a bit of this reminder lately. I plan to start reading to the kids asap.

"Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don't, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths."

I cannot highly enough recommend that every American citizen read this book. Truly. Rarely has a book made me so fundamentally question vague positions or thoughts that I've supported over my lifetime without being eyes open enough to understand those positions. This book shook me to my very core, and I've lost a significant amount of sleep while reading it, and expect to lose more. It is still worth it.

"In what become known as the decade of lies, truth and trust were falling victim to fear, racism, and hatred. Virginia found herself in a ringside seat as the increasingly fragile ideal of democracy failed to find champions with alternate answers."

"I knew my mother was criticised for failing properly to drape vulgar surfaces such as coal scuttles, the back of her piano, and me. Shocking child that I was. I never questioned my disgrace, for to do so would have been to broach matters of which a 'nice' girl must remain ignorant."

"Totally normal. In fact, a Sonny and Malik fight is one of the few things guaranteed in life, right up there with death, taxes, and Kanye West rants."

Incredibly well-written. Reads like an almost-seamless novel.

"The president, this advisor added, had thought to himself, "Am I intellectually as smart as Jimmy Carter? No, but I don't need to be. Do I have the vast reservoir of political cachet that the Bushes have? No, but I don't need that. What do I have? I can go one-on-one playing tennis. I don't need to play chess. I don't need long-range, strategic diplomacy."

"'This degradation of the American experiment is real. This is tangible. Truth is no longer governing the White House statements. Nobody believes--even the people who believe in him somehow believe in him without believing what he says.'"

Extraordinary quote from Jim Mattis. Terrifying, really.

"Finally, Hayek said, authoritarian types need to weld the group together by appealing to their basic human weaknesses. 'It seems to be easier for people to agree on a negative program--on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of the better off--than on any positive task. The contrast between the 'we' and the 'they' is consequently always employed by those who seek the allegiance of huge masses.'"

"If Trump's actions have turned the US government into one of his failed businesses, his rhetoric is turning our national stage into one of his reality television shows."

"A deep belief that your moment in time is the Pinnacle, the only standard of judgment extending from the creation of light until the black apocalypse, that what you believe right now is eternal truth because you believe it so fervently--those deep beliefs so crucial at the moment but none of them more permanent than a puff of air across a palmful of dry talcum."

"Oh, Mary said, life is mostly just what happens. Choice or chance or fate, gods or not. Like it or not. Things happen, we do what we think is in our best interests or just convenient, and then we live with the consequences."

"All that was necessary was a law degree and a uterus: a lethal combination."

"Then he'd tried believing in the Universe, which seemed sound enough until he'd innocently started reading new books with words like Chaos and Time and Quantum in the titles. He'd found that even the people whose job of work was, so to speak, the Universe, didn't really believe in it and were actually quite proud of not knowing what it really was or even if it could theoretically exist. To Newt's straightforward mind this was intolerable."

Firstly, God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e., everybody.] to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won‘t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

The writing is lyrical and flowing, kin to Pat Conroy's descriptions of similar Low Country flats and sea, and nearly as well-written. But whereas Conroy klunks the reader on the head with long passages of beauty, Owens flows into the reader slowly, like tides coming in and then receding. I think it's a triumph of a first novel, and I very much hope that she will publish again. Highly recommend.

"Marsh is not swamp. Marsh is a space of light, where grass grows in water, and water flows into the sky. Slow-moving creeks wonder, carrying the orb of the sun with them to the sea, and long-legged birds lift with u expected grace--as though not built to fly--against the road of a thousand snow geese."

I read Columbine years back, and was expectant this this book would be just as well-written and researched; it was. However, the tone and approach Cullen takes in Parkland is distinctly different than Columbine, with years of second-hand trauma informing the shape this book takes. Parkland wasn't entirely what I expected, but it's definitely another accomplishment and well worth the read.

This novel was mind-bending for me, and fascinating in the best way. The self-destructive characters are entirely relatable, and the way the story weaves and bobs amongst them while incorporating the music/pause theme is absolutely artistic. Great book, highly recommend.

"But Bennie knew that what he was bringing into the world was shit.Too clear, too clean. The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic Holocaust! Bennie knew better than to say this stuff aloud."

This was in some ways an incredibly difficult book to read, from a previous-trauma-perspective; however, I also plan to give it to my children as teenagers when I feel that they are old enough to learn what this author has to tell them. This book is not clinical, it is written for the layman by an expert, and is invaluable information. Highly recommend.

"Who knew, or cared, the names of the Turks who had ordered the destruction of the Buddha's at Bamiyan? Yet living or dead: their acts stood. It was the worst kind of immortality. Intentionally or no: I had extinguished a light at the heart of the world."

I devoured this book--such that I didn't stop to type out passages that knocked something loose in my soul here and there. Highly recommend reading for any woman. It is eye-opening, deft, deep, and genuine.

"Jennifer J. Freyd...wrote an open letter to the administration. She condemned their 'self-congratulatory and defensive stance'. She discussed a term I had never heard of, institutional betrayal, which can cause victims 'harm that occurs above and beyond that caused by the sexual violence itself. The irony is that institutional betrayal is not only bad for those dependent upon the institution, but comes to haunt the institution itself.'"