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mika_ added 2 items to 100 Favorite Books of Poetry list

7 years, 6 months ago

mika_ added 2 items to Read in 2016 list

7 years, 6 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to 100 Favorite Books of Poetry list

"The Black Tulips" The black rain filled the hands of every cup and passed like a great wing over the earth. The black rain fell with a fine and icy music, fell through my fingers with its sooty light. And in the morning the garden was as dark and still as the moment before a match. Everywhere the black tulips had raised their heads, their martins' heads, slick and violet with remorse, everywhere something had gone out; my black hands were flickering between the needled trees. Now I know that grief has no sense of its place, that what's in my throat is as hard as a bulb, pale with its cracking, its sudden green voices. And I know that the earth has no sense of our grief, that the wash of rain is a kind of infection. Whenever I wake I see the black tulips, their small fists closing in defiance of the light, and whenever I sleep it is the room unfolding into the vast petals of the night. Those dark dresses with their anxious hooks and eyes are my dresses, glad to be free of my body; that black wing folded against my chest is my arm with her prisoner dreams--all matches and keys. Because the black rain fell with its terrible handprint, because the garden cried out with its icy music, because the night holds our shadows like an armful of flowers, glistening as if they'd been picked in the rain, because our bodies have a pale and a brittle cover, and our blood is an ancient and clotted drum, I know that my throat has lost sense of its voices and that what infects us is all that remains.

7 years, 6 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Favorite Books of Short Stories list

7 years, 6 months ago

mika_ added 2 items to Read in 2016 list

7 years, 6 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Read in 2016 list

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ rated Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York

 Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York 6/10

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 8 items to their collection

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 2 items to their collection

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Read in 2016 list

"Can living artwork die? Can it live before it dies?"

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Read in 2016 list

"But when justice is done the world drops away." "Reality is a sound, you have to tune in to it not just keep yelling." "There is no person without a world." "And now time is rushing towards them where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back."

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Read in 2016 list

"From this point on, she whispered, we will either find or lose our souls." "All I ever wanted was a world without maps."

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 5 items to their collection

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ posted a list

Favorite Books of the 21st Century (27 books items)

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 27 items to Favorite Books of the 21st Century list

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to 100 Favorite Books list

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to 100 Favorite Books list

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Read in 2016 list

"These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice." "I enjoy the hope that when we meet I will not be estranged from you by all the oddnesses life has carved into me." "In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us."

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to 100 Favorite Sci Fi Books list

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Read in 2016 list

"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future." "We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing."

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Favorite Fantasy/Sci-Fi Series' list

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to 100 Favorite Sci Fi Books list

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Read in 2016 list

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ rated Dawn (Xenogenesis, Bk. 1)

 Dawn (Xenogenesis, Bk. 1) 6/10

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Read in 2016 list

"He knows what it's like to be afraid of thunder and have someone's hand to hold. What he does not know about is passion, although he is beginning to think passion has less to do with uncontrollable urges than with hope."

7 years, 7 months ago

mika_ added 2 items to their collection

7 years, 8 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Read in 2016 list

"The mind when it starts to doubt, I said, knows no limits, and will credit the most outlandish fantasies. I should have shut up, of course, instead of which I kept on tugging at that loose end of yarn." "How my mind wanders, trying to avoid itself, only to meet itself again, with a horrible start, coming round the other way." "This is the way it is with me, always looking in or looking out, a chilly pane of glass between me and a remote and longed-for world." "What is my true subject? Are we talking authenticity here? My only aim always, from the very start, was to get down in form that formless tension floating in the darkness inside my skull, like the unfading after-image of a lightning flash."

7 years, 8 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to Read in 2016 list

"'Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.'"

7 years, 8 months ago

mika_ added 1 item to 100 Favorite Books list

7 years, 8 months ago

mika_ rated The Corrections: A Novel

 The Corrections: A Novel 10/10

7 years, 8 months ago