Lit. in Boston

snippets of a great city and the great books read in it

[lit-boston]

"Was everyone really as alive as she was? ... If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance, and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was. One could drown in irrelevance." - Atonement by Ian McEwan

[lit-boston]

“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the realignment with what had been before and now seemed a little worse.”

- Atonement by Ian McEwan

[lit-boston]

"...one possible definition of the word city might be a site of concentrated change." - City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg

[lit-boston]

“The fact that ‘dusk’ could mean two nearly opposite things seemed indicative of something, if only that the membrane between the real and the cognitive had grown perilously thin.”

- City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg

[lit-boston]

"Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses." - Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez

[lit-boston]

“But how quickly pleasure sank back into the customary slurry of feelings: the mix of nervousness and regret, like something he both was and was not ready to let go of was about to be taken from him.”

- City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg

[lit-boston]

"his voice seemed to be conjuring lawless territories, where anything was possible..." - The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño

[lit-boston]

“…she did not believe in the purity of my principles. Morality, too, is a question of time.”

- Memories of my Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez

[lit-boston]

"There's more to it than that because words are everywhere, even in silence, which is never complete silence, is it?" - 2,666 by Roberto Bolaño 📸: @nexistant

[lit-boston]

"Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over." - The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien 📸: @nexistant

[lit-boston]

“Goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous… Both United form the noblest character and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.”

-John Phillips, 1781

[lit-boston]

“Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart… And that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.”

- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

[lit-boston]

“She said what she thought, and there was both innocence and maturity in that.”

-Petúr by Olivia Clare, compiled in the O'Henry Prize Stories 2014 Collection

[lit-boston]

"This exercise of authority did not sharpen his sense of self. Instead, it seemed to [him] that he was infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of all the people who had listened to him, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all." - Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

[lit-boston]

“I taught myself to stir in response to the captured textures of passing moments…”

- “Valentine” by Tessa Hadley, compiled in the O'Henry Prize Stories 2014 collection

[lit-boston]

“…they even came to suspect that love could be a feeling that was more relaxing and deepening than happiness, wild but momentary…”

- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

[lit-boston]

“Impulse arrested spills over, and the flood is passion, the flood is even madness: it depends on the force of the current, the heightened strength of the barrier. The unchecked stream flows smoothly down its appointed channels into calm well-being.”

- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley