Beth

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Beth.


Grand Union
Beth is currently reading
bookshelves: currently-reading
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
Loading...
Emma Cline
“They didn't have very far to fall--I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself. Feelings seemed completely unreliable, like faulty gibberish scraped from a Ouija board. My childhood visits to the family doctor were stressful events for that reason. He'd ask me gentle questions: How was I feeling? How would I describe the pain? Was it more sharp or more spread out? I'd just look at him with desperation. I needed to be told, that was the whole point of going to the doctor. To take a test, be put through a machine that would comb my insides with radiated precision and tell me what the truth was.”
Emma Cline, The Girls

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi
“Remember, be a good person, not a good girl. Good girls suffer a lot in this life.”
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, A Girl Is a Body of Water

“We’ve all struggled with this: how to explain the desire to do something most people find pathological at best, selfish at worst, incomprehensible always. We sometimes describe it as a chit we were each handed at birth, a card to get out of jail free if one thinks of her life as jail.

Or we talk about the horizontal light, which is how we refer to the light that sometimes replaces sunlight, the light we see for a brief moment virtually every day, the light that isn’t golden, but is as silver as the nacre inside a seashell, and comes not down from the heavens but from beyond the skyline, oozing and seeping until it lies over the day like an opalescent blanket inviting us to slide beneath it. There’s no telling when we’ll see the horizontal light; it appears at a different time every day, and most days we overlook it—it tends to come and go in an instant—and on other days we see and it lingers, but we manage to ignore it or, at least, after a while, to look away from it.

But then there are the days we can’t look away. “Man, the horizontal light was really strong today,” one of us will say, and the other two will say, “But you resisted,” and the first one will say, “Yeah, well, today I resisted. Who knows about tomorrow?” and we all say, “Who ever knows about tomorrow?” and we refresh our drinks.”
Judith Claire Mitchell, A Reunion of Ghosts

Karen Thompson Walker
“This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.”
Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

Karen Thompson Walker
“The more time that passes, what begins to seem uncanny to Ben is the fact that all the days ahead are such a darkness, that all of us move through our hours as if blindfolded, never knowing what will happen next. How can he send his daughter out into a world like that? But even an infant’s brain can predict the rough path of a falling object in flight. And so, maybe, in a way, Ben can see what’s coming: His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid. The sun will warm her face. The earth will ground her body. And her heart—now thrumming strong and steady, against her father’s chest, as he rocks her to sleep on a porch swing one evening in early summer, at the very start of a life—that heart: it will beat, and it will someday cease to beat. And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dreams.”
Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

year in books
Marisa
406 books | 38 friends

Ruth
203 books | 10 friends

David
326 books | 122 friends

Pam
Pam
118 books | 8 friends

Kevin
36 books | 5 friends

Philip S
7 books | 2 friends

Anna
2 books | 7 friends

Brooks
50 books | 4 friends

More friends…
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Wall Bangers!
754 books — 464 voters
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Abandoned Books
1,473 books — 1,465 voters

More…



Polls voted on by Beth

Lists liked by Beth