literanarchy

Literanarchy celebrates reading without rules: the beauty of serendipitous discovery, eclectic taste, everyday (mis)use of books, and all forms of rebellious reading. The name is inspired by Armando Petrucci's discussion of 'anarchic reading practices' in the 1999 scholarly collection A History of Reading in the West.

[literanarchy]

Blessed is an awakening that stirs beautiful memories in the heart.

Rhadopis of Nubia by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

It is a prison enclosed in walls of tradition, but I pass through them like an arrow.

Rhadopis of Nubia by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

... beauty, like fate, takes people unawares in ways of which they have never conceived.

Rhadopis of Nubia by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

Power could be folly, wisdom error, and wealth vanity. As for pleasure, it is pleasure, it can be nothing else.

Rhadopis of Nubia by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

Life passes like a swiftly unfolding dream.

Rhadopis of Nubia by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

Could this valley ever be wide enough to accommodate all those generations that have passed away? Death is as natural as life. What is the value of eternity as long as we eat our fill after going hungry, grow old after being young, and know despair after joy?

Rhadopis of Nubia by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

Yet, how beautiful life would be if he were propelled from triumph to triumph, transported from happiness to happiness. May it go that way always! If only the Fates would have mercy on man. But the obvious reality is that happiness is scarce in this world.

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

Can mortal man ascend to heaven with a soul still yearning for the earth?

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

... a priest's life is spent between question and answer – or between a question and the attempt to answer it. The question is the summary of the spiritual life.

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

Truly, love is an awesome thing.

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

Whereas the artist has no objective but to express the essence of things, and that is Beauty. For Beauty is the sublime essence of that which creates harmony among all things.

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

Immortality is itself a death for our dear, ephemeral lives.

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

Time, sadly, moves always onward – never turning back! And as it moves, it delivers the destiny decreed for each person, executing its will – whose alteration and exchange are the sole cosmic diversion easing the boredom of eternity. From it comes all that time decays, and all that is renewed; all that revels in youth, and all that moans with age unto its final demise.

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

It was, like all childhoods, a locked-away secret, a kind of ecstasy in a bottle – whose essence is known only to the gods, and which they guard.

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

For if only those suffering from loss would remember that Death is a void that effaces memory, and that the sorrows of the living vanish at the same speed with which the dead themselves disappear, how much toil and torment they could avoid for themselves!

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

But there's no trade union decision bound upon writers; they leave practising the art of the word only when their ability to transform with it something of the mystery of human life leaves them.

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz

[literanarchy]

Fate is a false belief to which the strong are not fashioned to submit.

Khufu’s Wisdom by Naguib Mahfouz