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1,753 books
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6,907 voters
Nancy
https://www.goodreads.com/zerzura
“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“New York was populated by the ambitious. It was often the only thing that everyone here had in common. Ambition”
― A Little Life
― A Little Life
“She had stepped into more than his arms for a dance, had waited for the precise seconds so it was possible and socially forgivable—the sunlit wedding procession, the eternal meal—and she had passed him a billet-doux as if they were within a Dumas. The note she had written said Good-bye. Then it said Hello. And then it reminded him that A message sent by pigeon to The Hague can sometimes change everything. She had, like one of those partially villainous and always evolving heroines, turned his heart over on the wrong day.”
― Divisadero
― Divisadero
“Don’t think I ever spent a minute of any day wondering why I did this work, or whether it was worth it. The call to protect life—and not merely life but another’s identity; it is perhaps not too much to say another’s soul—was obvious in its sacredness. Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, and the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.”
― When Breath Becomes Air
― When Breath Becomes Air
“All my life I have loved travelling at night, with a companion, each of us discussing and sharing the known and familiar behaviour of the other. It’s like a villanelle, this inclination of going back to events in our past, the way the villanelle’s form refuses to move forward in linear development, circling instead at those familiar moments of emotion. Only the rereading counts, Nabokov said. So the strange form of that belfry, turning onto itself again and again, felt familiar to me. For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout our lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever story we tell.”
― Divisadero
― Divisadero
Nancy’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Nancy’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,884 books
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4,591 friends
624 books
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59 friends
270 books
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40 friends
298 books
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49 friends
5 books
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89 friends
1 book
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55 friends
80 books
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27 friends
436 books
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108 friends
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