a collection of literary excellence

things and words for writers, bookworms, and people who generally prefer the made-up over the real. Also, all misanthropes are welcomed.

[books-n-quotes]

I wish that photographs were physical spaces, like tunnels; that you could crawl inside them and go back.

Lauren Oliver, Vanishing Girls

[books-n-quotes]

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

[books-n-quotes]

If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.

Jane Austen, Sense And Sensibility

[books-n-quotes]

Sometimes life has a cruel sense of humor, giving you the thing you always wanted at the worst time possible.

Lisa Kleypas, Sugar Daddy

[coral]

i’m hiding what i’m feeling, but i’m tired of holding this inside my head.

(via coral)

[coral]

One day I hope all my sadness will be worth it.

(via coral)

[coral]

I’m lonely. And I’m lonely in some horribly deep way and for a flash of an instant, I can see just how lonely, and how deep this feeling runs. And it scares the shit out of me to be this lonely because it seems catastrophic.

(via flame)

[coral]

I am weird, you are weird. Everyone in this world is weird. One day two people come together in mutual weirdness and fall in love.

Dr. Seuss (via coral)

[books-n-quotes]

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering.

Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

[riverselkie-deactivated20190510]

i feel like there’s this huge unfulfilled niche in the Dark Academia thing (kill your darlings, the secret history, dead poets society etc) for stories about women???? like can we have rakish girls quoting sappho and anxious genius poet girls, bespectacled, frantically tapping away at typewriters? wild girls trying to start literary movements and being dragged down by their own hubris? innocent girls discovering love and sex and angela carter? cute girls in 60s looking school uniforms investigating ~mysterious happenings~? going to class the next day hungover and exchanging knowing glances? can we just have. the thing

[dukeofbookingham-deactivated202]

A couple of ideas for those Dark Academia novels with a greater emphasis on girls or at least a more even gender ratio: The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton, The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman, Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl, Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson, and Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer. Rehearsal and Sleepwalking are especially good.

This annoyed me too, so when I wrote a campus novel I made sure it wasn’t a sausage fest. If you like Shakespeare and melodramatic friend groups you might enjoy it. Info here.

[books-n-quotes]

Falling in love was simple; one had only to yield. Digesting another person, however, and sustaining love, was bloody work, and not a soft job.

Hanif Kureishi, Midnight All Day

[bookmania]

I’m a very ordinary human being; I just happen to like reading books.

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

(via

bookmania

)

[books-n-quotes]

We are unusual and tragic and alive.

Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius

[coral]

It’s 5AM and the sky is full of stars.

It makes me thinking of you. (via coral)

[bookgeekconfessions]

“The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.

Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

Book Geek Quote

(via

bookgeekconfessions

)

[books-n-quotes]

It takes ten times as long to put yourself together as it does to fall apart.

Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

[moononastring]

The struggle when you want to reread all your favorite books but have piles and piles of new books you also want to read.