"‘You see,’ he went on, ‘it’s very much like your trying to reach Infinity. You know that it’s there, but you just don’t know where—but just because you can never reach it doesn’t mean that it’s not worth looking for.’"
— The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
"Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, interpersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction.
Communication is now often experienced as a superhuman phenomena that towers above individuals. A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become."
— You Are Not a Gadget, Jaron Lanier.
Anonymous asked: What books can you recommend to a 17 year old girl? :)
Depends on what kind of 17 year old girl you are. :) What are you interested in reading?
"The pregnant heart / is driven to hopes that are the wrong / size for this world."
— from “Trouble” by Jack Gilbert.
"A certain look came over Lotte’s face, a look I’d seen many times before, and which I can only describe as a kind of stillness, as if everything that normally existed near the surface had retreated into the depths. A moment passed. I felt something one fro time to time experiences with those one is intimate with, when the distance that all the while has been folded up like a Chinese paper toy suddenly springs open between you. And then Lotte shrugged, breaking the spell, and said she didn’t know. She didn’t say anything else about it, but the next day I saw her scanning the newspaper, looking, I felt sure, for some report of the accident. She walked away, you see. She walked away without waiting to find out what had happened."
— Great House, Nicole Krauss.
"‘At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they’ll break my heart.’"
— Freedom, Jonathan Franzen.
"But the softer parts of him, his heart and his brain, were awash in hopelessness at the enormity of it."
— Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.
"An additional vexing wrinkle to the girl issue was the fact that the ones Richard attracted were almost invariably music fans, and that Walter, being Richard’s oldest and biggest fan, was in bitter competition with them. Girls who otherwise might have been friendly to a lover’s best friend, or at least tolerant of him, found it necessary to be frosty to Walter, because serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness."
— Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.
"We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait."
— Great House by Nicole Krauss.
