Yet I must give some preliminary account of him, if only to explain one queer fact, which is that I have to introduce my hero to the reader wearing the cassock of a novice.
And now, with my third reading of The Brothers, having read the book leisurely for a class in high school and again at a rather frenetic pace in college for a course taken at UC Davis on Dostoevsky in Russian literature, I now discover why I always thought Alyosha was the good guy in the story, or rather, the hero of it, when indeed that is how he is portrayed by Toastea ski (siriously, Siri?) in the novel.
“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”
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“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.”
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“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
― A Man Without a Country
― A Man Without a Country
“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
― The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928
― The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928
Theatre Books and Plays
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A room for lovers of theatre, theater books, texts on acting, directing, theory and scripts.
David’s 2025 Year in Books
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