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21 books
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12 voters
Joshua
https://www.goodreads.com/joshuahardina
don’t think I can explain the despair my surroundings inspired in me. Though I now suspect, given the circumstances and my disposition, I would’ve been unhappy anywhere, in Biarritz or Caracas or the Isle of Capri, I was then convinced that
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“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
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“To appeal for help to any human being—I could expect nothing from that expedient. Supposing I complained to my father or my mother, or to the police, the government—I wondered if in the end I would not be argued into silence by someone in good graces with the world, by the excuses of which the world approved.”
― No Longer Human
― No Longer Human
“One cannot change, that is to say become a different person, while continuing to acquiesce to the feelings of the person one has ceased to be.”
― Du côté de chez Swann
― Du côté de chez Swann
“One was taught that such things could not be; that things like Coleridge’s “Cristabel” or Bram Stoker’s evil fairy tale were only the warp and woof of fantasy. Of course monsters existed; they were the men with their fingers on the thermonuclear triggers in six countries, the hijackers, the mass murderers, the child molesters. But not this. One knows better. The mark of the devil on a woman’s breast is only a mole, the man who came back from the dead and stood at his wife’s door dressed in the cerements of the grave was only suffering from locomotor ataxia, the bogeyman who gibbers and capers in the corner of a child’s bedroom is only a heap of blankets. Some clergymen had proclaimed that even God, that venerable white warlock, was dead.”
― 'Salem's Lot
― 'Salem's Lot
“Now a strange mood took hold of me, as I walked silent and alone through the last of the pines and the cypress knees that seemed to float in the black water, the gray moss that coated everything. It was as if I traveled through the landscape with the sound of an expressive and intense aria playing in my ears. Everything was imbued with emotion, awash in it, and I was no longer a biologist but somehow the crest of a wave building and building but never crashing to shore. I saw with such new eyes the subtleties of the transition to the marsh, the salt flats. As the trail became a raised berm, dull, algae-choked lakes spread out to the right and a canal flanked it to the left. Rough channels of water meandered out in a maze through a forest of reeds on the canal side, and islands, oases of wind-contorted trees, appeared in the distance like sudden revelations. The stooped and blackened appearance of these trees was shocking against the vast and shimmering gold-brown of the reeds. The strange quality of the light upon this habitat, the stillness of it all, the sense of waiting, brought me halfway to a kind of ecstasy.”
― Annihilation
― Annihilation
Literary Horror
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— last activity Sep 16, 2024 08:55PM
A group for fans of literary horror. We will be discussing all things horrible and literary but especially those horrible volumes that either aspire t ...more
Folk Horror Revival
— 647 members
— last activity May 04, 2022 06:59AM
A gathering place to share and discuss Folk Horror in fiction and non-fiction and also the related fields of psychogeography, hauntology, folklore, cu ...more
Joshua’s 2023 Year in Books
Take a look at Joshua’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
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