895 books
—
2,495 voters
Discover new books on Goodreads
Meet your next favorite book
Katabasis
by
“The perfect life, the perfect lie, I realised after Christmas, is one which prevents you from doing that which you would ideally have done (painted, say, or written unpublishable poetry) but which, in fact, you have no wish to do. People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances.”
―
―
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
― Walden or, Life in the Woods
― Walden or, Life in the Woods
“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.”
― By-Line: Ernest Hemingway - Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades
― By-Line: Ernest Hemingway - Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
―
―
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Cosmos
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Cosmos
Ted’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Ted’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
495 books
|
427 friends
151 books
|
2 friends
38 books
|
135 friends
167 books
|
84 friends
75 books
|
12 friends
2,799 books
|
332 friends
3 books
|
52 friends
78 books
|
22 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Ted
Lists liked by Ted