Sign in with Facebook
76,859 books
—
285,950 voters
Dat
https://www.goodreads.com/datoetry
They hated him because he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery. He preserved from collectivisation some discernible part of his personality; he could not be drawn at moments of sentiment to talk of his girl, his
...more
InDieuSperamus liked this
“it is also, according to Nietzsche, a lesson in style (because morality and style are two sides of the same coin): ‘Schopenhauer’s rough and somewhat bear-like soul teaches us not so much to feel the absence of the suppleness and courtly charm of good French writers as to disdain it’.17 Did Nietzsche always draw all the consequences of this? Houellebecq certainly did: it is no coincidence if he constantly replies to all those who eternally reproach him for lack of style by quoting Schopenhauer’s famous saying ‘the first – and virtually the only – condition of a good style is having something to say’.”
― In the Presence of Schopenhauer
― In the Presence of Schopenhauer
“I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight of our own Horoscope. On the one hand we’re proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter – this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it’s a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There’s no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We’d prefer to think we’re free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We’d rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable. Therefore I’m convinced that we should get to know our prison very well.”
― Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
― Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
“Anyway, he saw death as a magnetic field that every living thing must enter. He was ready for it. He had even thought that since he had been unconscious under the respirator for an entire month, he might just as well have died in the hospital and avoided further trouble. Yet here he was in his birthplace. Intensive-care nurses had told him that the electronic screens monitoring his heart had run out of graphs, squiggles, and symbols at last and, foundering, flashed out nothing but question marks. That would have been the way to go, with all the machines confounded, from unconsciousness to nonconsciousness.”
― Collected Stories
― Collected Stories
“I have not entered her. From the beginning my desire has not taken on that direction, that directedness. Lodging my dry old man’s member in that blood-hot sheath makes me think of acid in milk, ashes in honey, chalk in bread. When I look at her naked body and my own, I find it impossible to believe that once upon a time I imagined the human form as a flower radiating out from a kernel in the loins. These bodies of hers and mine are diffuse, gaseous, centreless, at one moment spinning about a vortex here, at another curdling, thickening elsewhere; but often also flat, blank. I know what to do with her no more than one cloud in the sky knows what to do with another.”
― Waiting for the Barbarians
― Waiting for the Barbarians
“What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children? It is the fault of Empire! Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in history and plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one:”
― Waiting for the Barbarians
― Waiting for the Barbarians
Dat’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Dat’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
225 books
|
235 friends
377 books
|
69 friends
563 books
|
44 friends
242 books
|
51 friends
369 books
|
138 friends
115 books
|
64 friends
218 books
|
43 friends
1,914 books
|
20 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Dat
Lists liked by Dat
