#reading tabs

“The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue” definitely lived up to the hype. It’s tied for my favorite book of all time now and is definitely one I will be re-reading! A few of my favorite quotes from the book that don’t include spoilers (there which contained spoilers) are as follows:

1. “Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives — or to find strength in a very long one.” (pg. 35)

2. “It is the kind of day designed for wood fires, and mugs of tea, and well-loved books.” (pg. 76)

3. “There is defiance in being a dreamer.” (pg. 117)

4. “Here is life in still frames. Moments like Polaroids. Like paintings. Like flowers pressed between a book. Perfectly preserved.” (pg. 337)

If you’re looking for a book to read with magical twists, time jumps into the past, so a bit of historical fiction, and a romantic sub-plot, I would highly recommend this book! 5/5 ⭐️.

January 13, 2022

‘I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.’

‘Out my window this morning, just before sunrise, a deer stood in a fog so dense and bright that the second one, not too far away, looked like the unfinished shadow of the first.’

‘You can color that in. You can call it “The History of Memory.”’

‘Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division.’

‘What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?... What is a country but a life sentence?’

‘How, in my screeching delight, I forgot to say Thank you.’

‘I was having a panic attack. And you knew it. For a while you said nothing, then started to hum the melody to “Happy Birthday.” It was not my birthday but it was the only song you knew in English, and you kept going. And I listened, the phone pressed so hard to my ear that, hours later, a pink rectangle was still imprinted on my cheek.’

‘Monarchs that survived the migration passed this message down to their children. The memory of family members lost from the initial winter was woven into their genes.’

‘When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?’

‘You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.’

‘What do we mean when we say survivor? Maybe a survivor is the last one to come home, the final monarch that lands on a branch already weighted with ghosts.’

‘What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.’

‘To say possessing a heartbeat is never as simple as the heart’s task of saying yes yes yes to the body.’

‘How I fled my shitty high school to spend my days in New York lost in library stacks, reading obscure texts by dead people, most of whom never dreamed a face like mine floating over their sentences—and least of all that those sentences would save me.’

‘In the village where Lan grew up, a child, often the smallest or weakest of the flock, as I was, is named after the most despicable things: demon, ghost child, pig snout, monkey-born, buffalo head, bastard—little dog being the more tender one. Because evil spirits, roaming the land for healthy, beautiful children, would hear the name of something hideous and ghastly being called in for supper and pass over the house, sparing the child. To love something, then, is to name it after something so worthless it might be left untouched—and alive. A name, thin as air, can also be a shield. A Little Dog shield.’

‘I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong.’

‘“Hey.” The jowlboy leaned in, his vinegar mouth on the side of my cheek. “Don’t you ever say nothin’? Don’t you speak English?” He grabbed my shoulder and spun me to face him. “Look at me when I’m talking to you.” He was only nine but had already mastered the dialect of damaged American fathers.’

‘Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.’

‘The past never a fixed and dormant landscape but one that is re-seen. Whether we want to or not, we are traveling in a spiral, we are creating something new from what is gone.’

‘None of us spoke as we checked out, our words suddenly wrong everywhere, even in our mouths.’

‘No object is in a constant relationship with pleasure, wrote Barthes. For the writer, however, it is the mother tongue. But what if the mother tongue is stunted? What if that tongue is not only the symbol of a void, but is itself a void, what if the tongue is cut out? Can one take pleasure in loss without losing oneself entirely?’

‘Our mother tongue, then, is no mother at all—but an orphan... Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.’

‘Two languages cancel each other out, suggests Barthes, beckoning a third. Sometimes our words are few and far between, or simply ghosted. In which case the hand, although limited by the borders of skin and cartilage, can be that third language that animates where the tongue falters.’

‘For a moment almost too brief to matter, this made sense—that three people on the floor, connected to each other by touch, made something like the word family.’

‘for how can there be a private space if there is no safe space, if a boy’s name can both shield him and turn him into an animal at once?’

‘Because gunshots, lies, and oxtail—or whatever you want to call your god—should say Yes over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reason but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn’t it?’

‘You were born, the woman thinks, because no one else was coming. Because no one else is coming, she begins to hum.’

‘It’s a beautiful country, she’s been told, depending on who you are.’

‘A woman stands on the shoulder of a dirt road begging, in a tongue made obsolete by gunfire, to enter the village where her house sits, has sat for decades. It is a human story. Anyone can tell it. Can you tell? Can you tell the rain has grown heavy, its keystrokes peppering the blue shawl black?’

‘But which land? Which border that was crossed and erased, divided and rearranged?’

‘A world where there are no soldiers or Hueys and the woman is only going for a walk in the warm spring evening, where she speaks real soft to her daughter, telling her the story of a girl who ran away from her faceless youth only to name herself after a flower that opens like something torn apart.’

‘The white-haired man raises a glass and makes a toast, grins. Five other glasses are lifted to meet his, the light falls in each shot because the law says so. The shots are held by arms that belong to men who will soon cut open the macaque’s skull with a scalpel, open it like a lid on a jar. The men will take turns consuming the brain, dipped in alcohol or swallowed with cloves of garlic from a porcelain plate, all while the monkey kicks beneath them. The fishing rod cast and cast but never hitting water. The men believe the meal will rid them of impotence, that the more the monkey rages, the stronger the cure. They are doing this for the future of their genes—for the sake of sons and daughters.’

‘The brain of the macaque monkey is the closest, of any mammal, to a human’s.’

‘Macaques are capable of self-doubt and introspection, traits once thought attributable only to humans. Some species have displayed behavior indicating the use of judgment, creativity, even language. They are able to recall past images and apply them to current problem solving. In other words, macaques employ memory in order to survive.’

‘Who will be lost in the story we tell ourselves? Who will be lost in ourselves? A story, after all, is a kind of swallowing.’

‘The rain keeps on because nourishment, too, is a force.’

‘Everything good is always somewhere else’

‘We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward.’

‘1964: When commencing his mass bombing campaign in North Vietnam, General Curtis LeMay, then chief of staff of the US Air Force, said he planned on bombing the Vietnamese “back into the Stone Ages.” To destroy a people, then, is to set them back in time. The US military would end up releasing over ten thousand tons of bombs in a country no larger than the size of California—surpassing the number of bombs deployed in all of WWII combined.’

‘I don’t know what I’m saying. I guess what I mean is that sometimes I don’t know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel more like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. Can you hear me yet? Can you read me?’

‘When I first started writing, I hated myself for being so uncertain, about images, clauses, ideas, even the pen or journal I used. Everything I wrote began with maybe and perhaps and ended with I think or I believe.’

‘Sometimes we are given only two choices. While doing research, I read an article from an 1884 El Paso Daily Times, which reported that a white railroad worker was on trial for the murder of an unnamed Chinese man. The case was ultimately dismissed. The judge, Roy Bean, cited that Texas law, while prohibiting the murder of human beings, defined a human only as White, African American, or Mexican. The nameless yellow body was not considered human because it did not fit in a slot on a piece of paper. Sometimes you are erased before you are given the choice of stating who you are.’

When Science Communication Backfires

Beluga whale (guess where this came from)

The Tragedy of the Market

I NEED YOUR HELP! PLEASE!!!

I already know how to play but I'm not that good...

any websites? youtube?