“The truth is that I’ve spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm… maybe if I hadn’t gone with Spike… maybe if I could have lived more peaceably… maybe if I’d met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn’t done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, the promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done. The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.”
― The Stone Gods
― The Stone Gods
“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
― Brave New World
― Brave New World
“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.”
― Brave New World
― Brave New World
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
We lived in the gaps between the stories.”
― The Handmaid’s Tale
“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that 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. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
― The Secret History
― The Secret History
Martina’s 2023 Year in Books
Take a look at Martina’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
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