manda
is currently reading
progress:
(page 116 of 417)
"Loving how this book is simultaneously fantastical and yet grounded in reality. It's like listening to a grandfather tell tales of what was. In amongst the facts, you're also getting a fairytale. It's a grand soap opera so far, and while some characters get short shrift, I'm enjoying the journey" — Oct 15, 2014 05:39PM
"Loving how this book is simultaneously fantastical and yet grounded in reality. It's like listening to a grandfather tell tales of what was. In amongst the facts, you're also getting a fairytale. It's a grand soap opera so far, and while some characters get short shrift, I'm enjoying the journey" — Oct 15, 2014 05:39PM
manda
is currently reading
progress:
(page 657 of 880)
"If I could classify a book as performance art, this would be it. My brain is in a constant state of anxiety, constantly waiting for the next surprise. I'm in love and in hate. It's a constant emotional reaction. I simultaneously want to beat the book with a lead pipe and snuggle up next to it and comfort it. This isn't prose, it's poetry with a narrative. I'm in love." — Jan 16, 2016 05:28PM
"If I could classify a book as performance art, this would be it. My brain is in a constant state of anxiety, constantly waiting for the next surprise. I'm in love and in hate. It's a constant emotional reaction. I simultaneously want to beat the book with a lead pipe and snuggle up next to it and comfort it. This isn't prose, it's poetry with a narrative. I'm in love." — Jan 16, 2016 05:28PM
“Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.”
―
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“She knew that what she was going through was nothing special, just garden-variety heartbreak, the sort of thing that poets and novelists had been writing about for hundreds of years, but she also knew, from those same books, that there were people who never recover form it, ones who go on through life beset by a dim and painful longing.”
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“Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O Never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.”
― In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O Never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.”
― In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age
“Books have always been my escape - where I go to bury my nose, hone my senses, or play the emotional tourist in a world of my own choosing... Words are my best expressive tool, my favorite shield, my point of entry...When I was growing up, books took me away from my life to a solitary place that didn't feel lonely. They celebrated the outcasts, people who sat on the margins of society contemplating their interiors. . . Books were my cure for a romanticized unhappiness, for the anxiety of impending adulthood. They were all mine, private islands with secret passwords only the worthy could utter. If I could choose my favorite day, my favorite moment in some perfect dreamscape, I know exactly where I would be: stretched out in bed in the afternoon, knowing that the kids are taking a nap and I've got two more chapters left of some heartbreaking novel, the kind that messes you up for a week.”
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“Music is storming, driving, relentless, devotional, slinky, subtle, heartbreakingly-beautiful sounds that, lyrically, switch from the cynical to the sanguine, the defeated to the defiant, dealing in love, war, beauty, children, romance, rejection, Pethedine, poetry, panties, God, Auden, Johnny Cash, cold potatoes, too-much-money, not enough money, writer’s block, flowers, animals and more flowers. But maybe I’m projecting here.”
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manda’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at manda’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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