Iris
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The contradictory state of longing for intimacy but also wanting to keep others at arm’s length is called the hedgehog’s dilemma.
John Ready Reader One liked this
“I used to think healing meant ridding the body and the heart of anything that hurt. It meant putting your pain behind you, leaving it in the past. But I’m learning that’s not how it works. Healing is figuring out how to coexist with the pain that will always live inside of you, without pretending it isn’t there or allowing it to hijack your day. It is learning to confront ghosts and to carry what lingers. It is learning to embrace the people I love now instead of protecting against a future in which I am gutted by their loss.”
― Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
― Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
“Where do you wander, where do you search for this petal that grows from the stone in your chest?”
― Oculus: Poems
― Oculus: Poems
“He’d watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine. And then the sun would drift, the car rattling uncaringly away from it, and the world would return to its normal sad shapes and colors, the people to their normal sad state, a shift as cruel and abrupt as if it had been made by a sorcerer’s wand.”
― A Little Life
― A Little Life
“The world might indeed be a cursed circle; the snake swallowed its tail and there could be no end, only an eternal ruination and endless devouring.”
― Mexican Gothic
― Mexican Gothic
“Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they're correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of the graveyard.”
― The Great Silence
― The Great Silence
Iris’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Iris’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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