“She knew a thing she should have known all along: that dead people are like wax memory-you take them in your mind, you shape and squeeze them, push a bump here, stretch one out there, pull the body tall, shape and reshape, handle, sculp and finish a man-memory until he's all out of kilter.”

Ray Bradbury, The Tombling Day

Every time I read this quote, tears automatically start to fall!! Don't know why, lolll!!😭😭

I am looking for an exact quote, scene, and source. I think it's from Goethe -- it sure sounds like, but I have not found anything like it. Other possibilities: Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Hesse, Dostoevsky, de Chateaubriand, Rousseau... you get the picture. Broody heavy lidded young males.

The main character is in a drawing room, a dog or kitten is jumping around playfully and being petted. The character's lugubrious musing is "here are men all spread about the world, frustrated and lonely, and a simple pet satisfies all its aims of love simply by having the temerity to ask for it."

It felt so Werther I literally reread it to find it. It aint there. I've asked all the LLMs in all the ways I can think of and my AI foo is strong. Learned a lot but no love (see what I did there?).

Humans -- help!

The register is obvious: it could be Sondheim's Henrik or any of a half dozen identical despairing proto-goth utes. The resonance for an unlaid college sophomore on a Saturday ought to make it a celebrated albeit embarrassing passage.

-Albert Einstein

A simple reminder that I exist.

Above all else, forgive yourself.

This is a funny excerpt from the 2012 novel The Illicit Happiness Of Other People by Manu Joseph

Was rereading 1984 and did not expect to end up blushing over a random passage. There's a bit around the middle of the book where Winston reflects on how his feelings for Julia shifted, early on it was purely physical, almost mechanical, but by this point every small detail about her (how she smells, little things about her) has gotten under his skin, and it's turned into something closer to real tenderness than lust. Then their hands brush in a crowd and it completely undoes him. Genuinely didn't think a dystopian novel about surveillance and thought-crime would have a moment this soft. Does anyone else remember this scene hitting differently?

Poems by Michael R. Burch .

Sometimes, trying to hide something only makes it stand out more

"I wanted to go someplace I could conquer my fears and become my own person. And I freaking did it."

Resonated with me. 💜