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“His true goal was not to free the prisoners; it was to show that people without fear still exist. That, too, was playacting. But he had no other possibility. His choice was not between playacting and action. His choice was between playacting and no action at all. There are situations in which people are condemned to playact. Their struggle with mute power (the mute power across the river, a police transmogrified into mute microphones in the wall) is the struggle of a theater company that has attacked an army.”
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Human lives...are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence... into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life”
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“Do we ever give anyone the gift they actually want?”
― By Nightfall
― By Nightfall
“Not long ago, I caught myself experiencing a most incredible sensation. Leafing through a book on Hitler, I was touched by some of his portraits: they reminded me of my childhood. I grew up during the war; several members of my family perished in Hitler's concentration camps; but what were their deaths compared with the memories of a lost period in my life, a period that would never return?”
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
― The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“During the last two hundred years the blackbird has abandoned the woods to become a city bird. From the planet's viewpoint, the blackbird's invasion of the human world is certainly more important than the Spanish invasion of South America or the return to Palestine of the Jews. A shift in the relationships among the various kinds of creation (fish, birds, humans, plants) is a shift of a higher order than changes in relations among various groups of the same kind. Whether Celts or Slavs inhabit Bohemia, whether Romanians or Russians conquer Bessarabia, is more or less the same to the earth. But when the blackbird betrayed nature to follow humans into the artificial unnatural world, something changed in the organic structure of the planet. And yet no one dares to interpret the last two centuries as the history of the invasion of man's cities by the blackbird. All of us are prisoners of a rigid conception of what is important and what is not, and so we fasten our anxious gaze on the important, while from a hiding place behind our backs the unimportant wages ts guerrilla war, which will end in surreptitiously changing the world and pouncing on us by surprise.”
― The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
― The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
21st Century Literature
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For people interested in keeping up with the modern literary classics. We will be reading fiction and fine literature from 2000 to present, with the i ...more
The History Book Club
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"Interested in history - then you have found the right group". The History Book Club is the largest history and nonfiction group on Goodread ...more
Historical Fictionistas
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Welcome to Historical Fictionistas! We want to experience all different kinds of HF with all different kinds of people. The more diverse, the better. ...more
readers advisory for all
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life's too short to read crappy books. this is why readers' advisory exists. feel free to join if you are looking for "a book like____" or "a book tha ...more
Historical Fiction!
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— last activity Oct 17, 2018 08:00AM
Historical fiction books setting set in WWII,Korea or Japan
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