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The library, and step on it!

@the-library-and-step-on-it / the-library-and-step-on-it.tumblr.com

A blog about books. May include brilliant insights, not-so-brilliant insights, reading lists, articles, quotes, photosets, reviews, and passionate arguments about which Austen man is the dreamiest (Mr Tilney).
The sidebar gif was made by eudaimonium.
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the-library-and-step-on-it
booksalon
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contremineur
The officials have alerted us to ensure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, from a 1920 letter (written under quarantine in the south of France during the outbreak of Spanish influenza)

#F. Scott Fitzgerald#Zelda Fitzgerald#quote#The Lost Generation#books#reading#literature
the-library-and-step-on-it
henryclervals
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dsu2014

i fucking love marking my books up and underlining lines that make my heart hurt even if the line is crooked or moves into the text a bit, even if i can see it on the back of the page! i love folding down the corners of the pages so i know where the lines that I really love are and i love bracketing off paragraphs that are so good theyre too long to underline every sentence and folding one side of the book back a bit as i read and not being afraid to physically mark MY book up and engage with it and give it all of my love . ultimate move is sharing your annotated and marked up book w someone u love so they can see everything u love in the book and its like… intimate

#books#reading#literature
the-library-and-step-on-it
theclassicsreader
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lestempsdereveur
Curiosity. The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes "concern"; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent "bad" information from invading and suffocating the "good." Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibilities of coming and goings.

Michel Foucault, The Masked Philosopher

#Michel Foucault#quote#literary theory#books#reading#literature
the-library-and-step-on-it
vintagebooksdesign
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vintagebooksdesign

VINTAGE CLASSICS JAPANESE SERIES

Vintage books presents the newest set of beautiful, design-led collectible editions from some classic Japanese authors:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami 9781784875411

The Makioka Sisters - Junichiro Tanizaki 9781784875435

Out - Natsuo Kirino 9781784875404

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea – Yukio Mishima 9781784875428

The Housekeeper and the Professor -  Yoko Ogawa 9781784875442

The 5 book collection has been illustrated by New York based Japanese artist Yuko Shimizu and is available now.

#Vintage Books#cover design#books#reading#literature
the-library-and-step-on-it
megcarr13
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myrosecolouredgirl

so Charlotte Bronte read Emma by Jane Austen and was really interested in this minor character named Jane Fairfax who was poor and would have been a governess had she not married well and then Bronte wrote her own novel exploring the plight of the poor governess who married this guy named Edward Fairfax Rochester in a novel called Jane Eyre and my point is don’t let anyone tell you shit about fanfiction.

#Emma#Jane Austen#Charlotte Brontë#Jane Eyre#books#reading#literature
the-library-and-step-on-it
Growing up brought responsibilities, [Jude] found. Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought. Nature's logic was too horrid for him to care for. That mercy towards one set of creatures was cruelty towards another sickened his sense of harmony. As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you had felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be something glaring, garish, rattling, and the noises and glares hit upon the little cell called your life, and shook it, and warped it. If he could only prevent himself growing up! He did not want to be a man.

Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy.

#quote#Jude the Obscure#Thomas Hardy#books#reading#literature#victoriana
the-library-and-step-on-it
Some years ago a writer not much older than I am now told me (not bitterly, but matter-of-factly) that it was a good thing that I, as a young writer, did not have to face the darkness that he faced every day, the knowledge that his best work was behind him. And another, in his eighties, told me that what kept him going every day was the knowledge that his best work was still out there, the great work he would one day do. I aspire to the condition of the second of my friends. I like the idea that one day I'll do something that really works, even if I fear that I've been saying the same things for over thirty years. As we get older, each thing we do, each thing we write reminds us of something else we've done. Events rhyme. Nothing quite happens for the first time anymore.

Introduction to The View from the Cheap Seats, Neil Gaiman.

#quote#The View From the Cheap Seats#Neil Gaiman#writing#books#reading#literature