The journal
A curated selection from the Moniqs archive, newest first. More stories are being moved over from the original site.
Literature · Reflection
“But she loved studying and books, the way other people love wine for its power to make you forget. What else did she have? She lived in a deserted, silent house. The sound of her own footsteps in the empty rooms, the silence of the cold streets beyond the closed windows, the rai
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Literature · Reflection
The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things
Read storyLiterature · Reflection
“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second sy
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Literature · Reflection
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental
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Literature · Reflection
In life — with advancing age — one starts to understand the power of a person, who is constantly thinking. It is an enormous overmastering power. Everything perishes: youth, charms, passions — everything grows old and ruins. The thought doesn’t perish and beautiful is a person wh
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Literature · Reflection
“God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of “parties” with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you ut
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Literature · Reflection
“And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter—just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
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Literature · Reflection
“Can you imagine looking into your glass some morning and seeing a disfigurement – some hideous change that has come to you while you slept? Well, I seem to myself like that – I can’t bear to see myself in my own thoughts – I hate ugliness, you know – I’ve always turned from it
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Literature · Reflection
“There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live.” —Anton Chekhov, The Three Sisters
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Literature · Reflection
“She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of
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Literature · Reflection
“Moreover, probably owing to excessive self-consciousness, perhaps as the result of the generally unfortunate cast of my personality, there existed between my thoughts and feelings, and the expression of those feelings and thoughts, a sort of inexplicable, irrational, and utterly
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Literature · Reflection
“The tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes never! You’re asked an unexpected question, you don’t even flinch, it takes just a second to get yourself under control, you know just what you have to say to hide the truth, and you speak very convincingly, and nothing in your face
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