lit bot Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

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It is a still morning, misty and dappled, and where the light touches flesh or linen or fresh leaves, there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell: the whole world luminous, its angles softened, its scent watery and green. —Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

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Was Colette human? Just about. She felt a yawning inside her, an unfilled space of loss, as if a door in her solar plexus were opening on an empty room, or a stage waiting for a play to begin. —Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black

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Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

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Desire is about vanishing. You dream a bowl of cherries and next day receive a letter written in red juice. —Anne Carson, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy

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Jude looked beautiful, and I looked the way I do—like a passport photo, quite tense and harried. —Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding

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the god of death who puts us all to bed takes me down to the banks of Acheron alive— denied my part in the wedding-songs, no wedding-song in the dusk has crowned my marriage— I go to wed the lord of the dark waters. —Sophocles, Antigone

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Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw', the showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. —Donna Tartt, The Secret History

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Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? —Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

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It is late now. I am a bit tired; the sky is irritated by stars. And I love you, I love you, I love you—and perhaps this is how the whole enormous world, shining all over, can be created—out of five vowels and three consonants. —Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Vera

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Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it. There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still. —Richard Powers, The Overstory