Finished #Dhalgren
#SamuelRDelany
“I live in one city…Maybe you live in another. In mine, time...leaks…In your city, you're sane and I'm crazy…Because you keep telling me things are happening that don't fit with what I see…Some guy with a gun? In the park…I don't know if I want to live in yours!"
#TheBookshop
#PenelopeFitzgerald
‘It doesn't seem to fit at all at the back. Perhaps if I try to stand against the wall…’
'It'll come to you as you wear it,' the dressmaker replied…
'Are you sure?' asked Florence. The fitting seemed to be turning into a conspiracy…
#TheWriteWomen
#TheCountryLife
#RachelCusk
…the material hung about me in great folds. Finding no other explanation, I realized that I appeared to have shrunk quite drastically…It was as if I were disappearing; or rather, as if the space I was entitled to occupy were being gradually withdrawn.
#TheWriteWomen
…And so I continue to cram tokens into the public telephone…God knows where they are now, the people from whom I am to receive instructions or, rather-let's come right out and say it-take orders. It is obvious that I am a subordinate…a pawn in a very complicated game…
#IfonaWintersNightaTraveler
#ItaloCalvino
Where would I go out to? The city outside there has no name yet, we don't know if it will remain outside the novel or whether the whole story will be contained within its inky blackness. I know only that this first chapter is taking a while to break free…
x.com/deepvellum/s...
#TheEnglishUnderstandWool
#HelenDeWitt
a bolt of very beautiful handloomed tweed…She had needed only a few metres,but she had bought the entire bolt to prevent it from falling into ignoble hands…
A note: Take this to Peter Craven of 34, Savile Row. The English understand wool.
#TheWriteWomen
#Poguemahone
#PatrickMcCabe
crying & picking fights…
when she's feeling upset…
bout of the dreaded…
what we call the imni…
another word for anxiety or depression,
in Gaelic…
what it's like
when the V-1s have appeared
hanging there in silence…
frozen in the air…
above your head…
ready to come in…
#Flights
#OlgaTokarczuk
They pose themselves a question, and they give themselves an answer...And there is that other assumption, which is terribly dangerous- that we are constant, and that our reactions can be predicted.
#TheWriteWomen
KUBLAI: …Without them we could never remain here swaying, cocooned in our hammocks.
POLO: Then the hypothesis must be rejected. So the other hypothesis is true: they exist and we do not.
KUBLAI: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.
POLO: And here, in fact, we are.
Finished #InvisibleCities
#ItaloCalvino
KUBLAI: …however far our troubled enterprises…take us,we both harbor within ourselves this silent shade…
POLO: Unless…those who strive in camps and ports exist only because we two think of them…
KUBLAI: …I never think them.
POLO: Then they do not exist.
#MyBrilliantFriend
#ElenaFerrante
She sat on the edge of the bed in
underpants and bra. Next to her was the wedding dress, which looked like the body of a dead woman….
"What's going to happen to me, Lenù?"
#TheWriteWomen
#Dhalgren
#SamuelRDelany
“Arthur goes out there, every day…Then he comes home…Do you know, I don't believe all that out there is real. Once the smoke covers him, I don't believe he goes anywhere. I don't believe there's anyplace to go…I don't think I believe there ever was.”
#TheSummerBook
#ToveJansson
“But we were right here all the time!"
Sophia shouted. "Why didn't he say we were here?"
"To spare us."
"Why? Why do we have to be spared whenever something happens? That's not the truth. We didn't have to be spared..."
#TheWriteWomen
#MobyDick
#HermanMelville
Round the world…whereto does all that circumnavigation conduct? Only through numberless perils to the very point whence we started…Were this world an endless plain…in pursuit…they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed.
#MelvilleMonday 🐳
Black and yellow print of author and book title.
Poguemahone
by Patrick McCabe
#TheEnchantedApril
#ElizabethvonArnim
“To Those who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be Let Furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z, Box 1000, The Times."
#TheWriteWomen
#AgainsttheDay
#ThomasPynchon
“This world you take to be 'the' world will die, and descend into Hell…Flanders will be the mass grave of History…you children drift in a dream …imagine the fabric of Time torn open, and yourselves swept through, with no way back, orphans and exiles…”
Loved this one.
#TheBloodyChamber
#AngelaCarter
...the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom in great glass jars…lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your fingers as if you had dipped them in turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him; that are white.
And stain you.
#TheWriteWomen
KUBLAI: Perhaps this dialogue of ours is taking place between two beggars…
POLO: Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland…and the hanging garden of the Great Khan's palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.
#InvisibleCities
#ItaloCalvino
KUBLAI: …visit all the countries…you have never moved from this garden…
POLO: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space…
KUBLAI: I, too, am not sure I am here…
POLO: Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids…
#SleeplessNights
#ElizabethHardwick
I have always, all my life, been looking for help from a man. It has come many times and many more it has not. This began early...The predator's first gift...was to reveal…to us the tangled nature of bribery. This...was a lasting lesson.
#TheWriteWomen
#Poguemahone
#PatrickMcCabe
She says,
without so much as a
by-your-leave…
when - whee! - you hear
this rocket
it's a V-1
& then you hear nothing
until down it comes
& another wall
or gable-end tumbles
gone, as so many memories
before
reduced to rubble forever.
#AntónioLoboAntunes
António Lobo Antunes, One of Europe’s Most Revered Writers, Dies at 83 www.nytimes.com/2026/03/05/b...
#AntónioLoboAntunes
António Lobo Antunes
Sep 1, 1942 to Mar 5, 2026
www.euronews.com/culture/2026...
The great Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes GCSE has passed away at the age of 83.
Antunes died in Lisbon, the city where he was born, the site of his psychiatric practice, and the setting for many of his 30+ works.
Portugal has declared a national day of mourning.
#DaddysGoneAhunting
#PenelopeMortimer
The women have no such understanding...little icebergs, each keeps a bright and shiny face above the water; below the water…each keeps her own isolated personality...Combined, their energy could start a revolution...drive an atomic plant.
#TheWriteWomen
We'll have a tyranny of conformist nonconformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image….
Finished #ThePaleKing
#DavidFosterWallace
the Reduce Government candidate …a symbolic Rebel…whose election was underwritten by…soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against…corporate life will consist in buying products….
