Books: Best Of
I climbed up the Western Wall until I reached the Statue of a Woman carrying a Beehive, fifteen metres above the Pavement. The Woman is two or three times my own height and the Beehive is covered with marble Bees the size of my thumb. One Bee – this always gives me a slight sensation of queasiness – crawls over her left Eye. I squeezed Myself into
... See moreSusanna Clarke • Piranesi
When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.
Haruki Murakami • Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Fairness is a concept that holds only in limited situations. Yet we want the concept to extend to everything, in and out of phase. From snails to hardware stores to married life. Maybe no one finds it, or even misses it, but fairness is like love. What is given has nothing to do with what we seek.
Haruki Murakami • Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Our obituary writer is an extreme, pedantic gossip. He gets things wrong, but he gets them in detail.
Renata Adler • Speedboat
Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.
Chang-rae Lee • On Such a Full Sea: A Novel
What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? ... Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century before Christ. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might
... See moreMilan Kundera • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Trisolarans who deemed the humans bugs seemed to have forgotten one fact: The bugs have never been truly defeated.
Ken Liu • The Three-Body Problem (The Three-Body Problem Series Book 1)
Taciturn, silent, insensible to the new breath of vitality that was shaking the house, Colonel Aureliano Buendía could understand only that the secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez • One Hundred Years of Solitude
We have to eat happy eggs from happy chickens.