Words, Thoughts, Ruminations

George Orwell got it backward

Author Unknown

Demagoguery

Charles Zug

Hypernormalisation

Author Unknown

Power is in tearing human minds

Author Unknown

The mob mindset

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed • Jon Ronson

An Ad Hominem attack

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed • Jon Ronson

We are stars 🌌

Neil de Grasse

🌌✨

Michelle Thaller, NASA American astronom + and Research scientist

Letting go

On creation myths

Dept. of Speculation • Jenny Offil

Autobiography of Red

Anne Carson

American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis

Dangerous Creatures

Dept. of Speculation • Jenny Offil

Why I had to perform the part of a daughter

Unorthodox • Deborah Feldman

Perfectionism

Author Unknown

On T.S. Eliot

Dept. of Speculation • Jenny Offil

There is no adequate preparation for writing

Unorthodox • Deborah Feldman

The Writer’s Journey

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

Untitled

I taught you the names of the trees

Author Unknown

I taught the children of the world

Author Unknown

When God bestowed women on men

Author Unknown

I hadn’t told them about you

Author Unknown

Oh, my love,

You still ask me

Author Unknown

Soulmates

Plato

Ode to a Naked Beauty

Pablo Neruda

I’m building a home for myself

Author Unknown

I have someone’s childhood in my hands

Unknown Author

Imposter syndrome as a mother

Dept. Of Speculation • Jenny Offil

She felt very young

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

Did it matter then,

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

This body, with all its capacities

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

This brutal monster!

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

The world has raised its whip

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

Look, look, Septimus!

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

Close to his ear, deeply, softly

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

The human voice

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

Leaves were alive; trees were alive

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

To love makes one solitary

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

There was nobody

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

Men must not cut down trees

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

All this she saw

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

So on a summers day

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

Nothing exists outside us

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

They went in and out

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

The compensation of growing old

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

Jealousy

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

One cannot bring children into a world like this

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

So there was no excuse

Mrs Dalloway • Virginia Woolf

On poetry

Virginia Woolf

On war

Virginia Woolf

We burst out in scorn

Virginia Woolf

On poverty and wealth

Virginia Woolf

Stars

Virginia Woolf

Women and men in books

Virginia Woolf

Yet it is in our idleness

Virginia Woolf

One does not like to be told

Virginia Woolf

They had been written

Virginia Woolf

English patriarchy

Virginia Woolf

The professor

Virginia Woolf

If he had written dispassionately about women

Virginia Woolf

Possibly when the professor insisted

Virginia Woolf

Self-confidence

Virginia Woolf

Hence the enormous importance

Virginia Woolf

Women have served all these centuries

Virginia Woolf

Mirrors

Virginia Woolf

On Napoleon and Mussolini

Virginia Woolf

The looking-glass vision

Virginia Woolf

On men

Virginia Woolf

Moreover, in a hundred years

Virginia Woolf

For fiction, imaginative work

Virginia Woolf

Indeed, if women had no existence

Virginia Woolf

Some of the most inspired words

Virginia Woolf

On Shakespeare

Virginia Woolf

For it needs little skill in psychology

Virginia Woolf

The world did not say to her

Virginia Woolf

A woman was not encouraged to be an artist

Virginia Woolf

Unfortunately, it is precisely

Virginia Woolf

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men

Virginia Woolf

It is vain to say

Virginia Woolf

Masculine values vs Feminine values

Virginia Woolf

It was the flaw in the centre

Virginia Woolf

Lock up your libraries

Virginia Woolf

A book is not made of sentences

Virginia Woolf

On forms of literature

Virginia Woolf

You must illumine your own soul

Virginia Woolf

And I went on amateurishly

Virginia Woolf

Men, that is to say

Virginia Woolf

Two heads on one body

Virginia Woolf

The whole of the mind must lie wide open

Virginia Woolf

On overthinking will writing

Virginia Woolf

To write, that is all that matters

Virginia Woolf

Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom

Virginia Woolf

For books have a way

Virginia Woolf

When I rummage in my own mind

Virginia Woolf

Find no noble sentiments

Virginia Woolf

The writer seems constrained

Virginia Woolf

Is life like this

Virgina Woolf

If writer were a free man

Virginia Woolf

Life is not a series of gig lamps

Virginia Woolf

Let us record the atoms

Virginia Woolf

On James Joyce

Virginia Woolf

Any method is right

Virginia Woolf

For the moderns

Virginia Woolf

On Russian literature

Virginia Woolf

On English fiction

Virginia Woolf

The proper stuff of fiction

Virginia Woolf

Why are women

Virginia Woolf

The cataclysm has happened

D H Lawrence

They argued with men

D H Lawrence

They were free. Free!

D H Lawrence

Why couldn’t a girl be queenly?

D H Lawrence

On sex

D H Lawrence

And a woman had to yield

D H Lawrence

A woman could take a man

D H Lawrence

She wanted her girls to be free

D H Lawrence

Whereas the men, in gratitude

D H Lawrence

But that is how men are!

D H Lawrence

She was so much more mistress of herself

D H Lawrence

But in the Midlands

D H Lawrence

How little connexion he really had with people

D H Lawrence

He was at once too intimate with her

D H Lawrence

They were so intimate

D H Lawrence

But it was all a dream

D H Lawrence

Time went on

D H Lawrence

Vaguely she knew

D H Lawrence

The bitch-goddess, of Success

D H Lawrence

Money is a sort of instinct

D H Lawrence

I may be a good writer

D H Lawrence

He looked up to her

D H Lawrence

His child’s soul was sobbing with gratitude

D H Lawrence

The army leave me time to think

D H Lawrence

I see how inordinately strong

D H Lawrence

You can’t live without cash

D H Lawrence

Sex is just another form of talk

D H Lawrence

She liked to hear what the had to say

D H Lawrence

We bust apart and say spiteful things

D H Lawrence

Real knowledge comes out of the whole corpus of the consciousness

D H Lawrence

Bolshevism

D H Lawrence

On marriage

D H Lawrence

Perhaps the human soul needs excursions

D H Lawrence

The human soul

D H Lawrence

The effect of war

D H Lawrence

On youth

D H Lawrence

A stubborn stoicism

D H Lawrence

The air was soft and dead

D H Lawrence

She liked the inwardness of the forest

D H Lawrence

In her bitterness burned a cold indignation

D H Lawrence

A woman has to live her life

D H Lawrence

Anyhow the future’s going to have more sense

D H Lawrence

Forget our bodies, and then time passes

D H Lawrence

Solitude

D H Lawrence

'Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,'

D H Lawrence

It’s man that poisons the universe

D H Lawrence

On the novel

D H Lawrence

On industrialisation

D H Lawrence

Success had two main appetites

D H Lawrence

Live for your sake and your future

D H Lawrence

And one day when she came

D H Lawrence

His heart melted suddenly

D H Lawrence

She was old

D H Lawrence

Life. Life!

D H Lawrence

The seclusion of wood was illusory

D H Lawrence

All vulnerable things must perish

D H Lawrence

Tender! Somewhere she was tender

D H Lawrence

He was not afraid of himself

D H Lawrence

He loved darkness

D H Lawrence

Connie had played this woman so much

D H Lawrence

He held her fast

D H Lawrence

He was coming apart

D H Lawrence

Another self was alive in her

D H Lawrence

Having a child to oneself and having a child to a man

D H Lawrence

On motherhood

D H Lawrence

She was like a forest

D H Lawrence

Emotions that are ordered

D H Lawrence

It was ghastly to exist

D H Lawrence

She was thinking of her own Ted

D H Lawrence

Money

D H Lawrence

The world lay darkly

D H Lawrence

Always these arrangements!

D H Lawrence

The utter negation of natural beauty

D H Lawrence

The England of today

D H Lawrence

They were good and kindly

D H Lawrence

The iron and coal had eaten deep

D H Lawrence

Creatures of another reality

D H Lawrence

And yet when he had finished

D H Lawrence

Slavery of the masses

D H Lawrence

It is not who begets us

D H Lawrence

I thought like a house on fire

D H Lawrence

All the rest of the world disappear

D H Lawrence

All the lot. Their spunk is gone dead

D H Lawrence

To contemplate the extermination of the human species

D H Lawrence

Let’s live for summat else

D H Lawrence

Because when I feel the human world is doomed

D H Lawrence

Men turned into nothing but labour insects

D H Lawrence

He had brought columbines and campions

D H Lawrence

The universe shows us two aspects

D H Lawrence

Supreme pleasure?

D H Lawrence

But men are all alike: just babies

D H Lawrence

Still! The human existence is a good deal controlled

D H Lawrence

Though a little frightened, she let him have his way

D H Lawrence

In the short summer night she learnt so much

D H Lawrence

What liars poets and everybody were!

D H Lawrence

She was half dreaming of life

D H Lawrence

Away! Away! She sat in bitter tears

D H Lawrence

As for people? People were all alike

D H Lawrence

It was a complete narcotic

D H Lawrence

Connie looked at Venice

D H Lawrence

It is our mortal destiny

D H Lawrence

Perhaps only people who are capable of real togetherness

D H Lawrence

The world is more or less a fixed thing

D H Lawrence

Don’t believe in the world

D H Lawrence

Sex is really only touch

D H Lawrence

And it is a battle against the money

D H Lawrence

Better have me as a model

D H Lawrence

And he would gaze on her

D H Lawrence

Bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money

D H Lawrence

Living and spending isn’t the same thing

D H Lawrence

The only way to solve the industrial problem:

D H Lawrence

Money poisons you when you’ve got it

D H Lawrence

My soul softly flaps

D H Lawrence

Well, so many words

D H Lawrence

I wanted to be an artist

Ottessa Moshfegh

To affirm that it was better

Ottessa Moshfegh

My father was joyless

Ottessa Moshfegh

My long home—my last home

Charlotte Brontë

Women are supposed to be very calm

Charlotte Brontë

I don’t think sir you have a right to command me

Charlotte Brontë

The green snake of jealousy

Charlotte Brontë

Had an acute pleasure in looking

Charlotte Brontë

He made me love him

Charlotte Brontë

As if you were a dream

Charlotte Brontë

As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs

Charlotte Brontë

To be my second self

Charlotte Brontë

The waters came into my soul

Charlotte Brontë

Cracking my heart-strings

Charlotte Brontë

I have a rosy sky

Charlotte Brontë

I have no relative

Charlotte Brontë

And the more I drink, the more I feel

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What if man isn’t really a villain at all?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In order to get to know anyone at all

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Your to the tomb

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Turn my back on life altogether

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Little by little his attention began to fasten

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sink all his troubles in oblivion

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dreams such as these

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The abscess of his heart

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To talk nonsense in one’s own way

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Conduct ourselves like mad folk

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Never, never had she experienced anything like this

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The living soul demands to live

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It’s impossible to leap over nature

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Pain and suffering are inevitable

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

To be able to dare!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Time’s not what matters

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When a girl’s heart starts to feel sorry

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The educated youth is burning itself out

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You have blood on your hands!

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A hat is as plain as a pancake

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Was he to live merely in order to exist?

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The House in the Cerulean Sea

TJ Klune · 2020

A NEW YORK TIMES, USA TODAY, and WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER!<br/>A 2021 Alex Award winner!<br/>The 2021 RUSA Reading List: Fantasy Winner!<br/>An Indie Next Pick!<br/>One of Publishers Weekly's "Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2020"<br/>One of Book Riot’s “20 Must-Read Feel-Good Fantasies”<br/><br/>Lambda Literary Award-winning author TJ Klune’s bestselling, breakout contemporary fantasy that's "1984 meets The Umbrella Academy with a pinch of Douglas Adams thrown in." (Gail Carriger)<br/><br/>Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world.<br/><br/>Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn. And his secrets will come to light.<br/><br/>The House in the Cerulean Sea is an enchanting love story, masterfully told, about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place―and realizing that family is yours.<br/><br/>"1984 meets The Umbrella Academy with a pinch of Douglas Adams thrown in." ―Gail Carriger, New York Times bestselling author of Soulless

The Last Housewife: A Novel

Ashley Winstead · 2022

You all know the story of the other woman

Anne Sexton

O little Icarus

Anne Sexton

Within

Margaret Atwood

The Odyssey

Homer

BLUETS

Maggie Nelson

Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury

"Sixty years after the original publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel 'Fahrenheit 451' stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. This sixtieth-anniversary edition commemorates Ray Bradbury's masterpiece with a new introduction by Neil Gaiman ; personal essays on the genesis of the novel by the author ; a wealth of critical essays and reviews by Nelson Algren, Harold Bloom, Margaret Atwood, and others ; rare manuscript pages and sketches from Ray Bradbury's personal archive ; and much more. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature."--taken from back cover.

The Bone Readers

Jacob Ross ·

Taking a nap

Matsuo Basho

We Were Liars

E. Lockhart

<b>NOW AVAILABLE AS THE ORIGINAL STREAMING SERIES <i>WE WERE LIARS—</i>AND LOOK FOR E. LOCKHART’S NEW NOVEL IN THE WE WERE LIARS UNIVERSE, <i>WE FELL APART</i>, COMING NOVEMBER 4, 2025<br><br>#1 <i>NEW YORK TIMES</i> BESTSELLER • A <i>KIRKUS REVIEWS</i> BEST YOUNG ADULT BOOK OF THE CENTURY • The modern, sophisticated suspense novel that became a runaway smash hit on TikTok and introduced the world to a family hiding a jaw-dropping secret.<br><br>"Thrilling, beautiful, and blisteringly smart, <i>We Were Liars</i> is utterly unforgettable." —John Green, #1<i> New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>The Fault in Our Stars</i><br><br></b>A beautiful and distinguished family.<br>A private island.<br>A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.<br>A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.<br>A revolution. An accident. A secret.<br>Lies upon lies.<br>True love.<br>The truth.<br><br>Read it.<br>And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE.<b><br><br>Don’t miss any of the We Were Liars novels<br>WE WERE LIARS • FAMILY OF LIARS • WE FELL APART (Coming in November!)<br></b>

The Discomfort Of Evening

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

Getting older

Dept. of Speculation • Jenny Offil