Welcome to Bookmarker!

This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

Source code on GitHub (MIT license).

inspo/setting

Vladimir Nabokov, Ocean Vuong, Sally Rooney, Rachel Kushner, Saul Bellow, Ellen Ullman, Victor Serge, Roberto Bolaño, David Foster Wallace

really good descriptions of nature or other vivid life-like details for memoir/fiction

One muggy evening, I realized the time had come to say goodbye. I asked Harjinder to remove the oxygen mask and leave the room. My mother and sister sat on the edge of the bed. I opened my father’s mouth and gave him the first dose of morphine. Over the next few hours, I poured into him all the morphine I had.

The air in the room grew thick. Each breath sounded like a sea roaring for an eternity. He was slipping, he was drowning, and at times he appeared to be resisting. Tears flowed from his eyes until all the air left him and his body sank.

The power went out. The entire house fell into darkness. It felt timely; we didn’t have to see each other’s grief-stricken faces.

wow

—p.105 Homecomings (92) by n+1 4 years, 10 months ago

When I return from Maine, home again, I open the door to my apartment, afraid my roses will be withered, fainting dead. No rain for four days. I rush to the back, where I find them giddy, hurling color up from the ground like children with streamers at a parade.

—p.165 The Rosary (146) by Alexander Chee 4 years, 10 months ago

[...] Lately Marianne walks around Carricklea and thinks how beautiful it is in sunny weather, white clouds like chalk dust over the library, long avenues lined with trees. The arc of a tennis ball through blue air. Cars slowing at traffic lights with their windows rolled down, music bleating from the speakers. Marianne wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people and smiling. To feel that life was happening here, and not somewhere else far away.

—p.64 by Sally Rooney 4 years, 9 months ago

Back outside the cafe now, the sunlight is so strong it crunches all the colours up and makes them sing. Marianne's lighting a cigarette, with the box left open on the table. When he sits down she smiles at him through the small grey cloud of smoke. He feels she's being coy, but he doesn't know about what.

—p.126 by Sally Rooney 4 years, 9 months ago

Thank you, she says.

He starts the car and pulls out of the driveway. His vision has settled, objects have solidified his eyes again, and he can breathe. Overhead trees wave silvery individual leaves in silence.

—p.253 by Sally Rooney 4 years, 9 months ago

[...] Overhead the evening sky lay deep and colorless, and all around her nodded the tall weeds with dry, white, close-floreted heads. She had never known what they were called. The flowers nodded above her head, swaying in the wind that always blew across the fields in the dusk. She ran among them, and they whipped lithe aside and stood up again swaying, silent. [...]

middle of a big paragraph (opening) with lots of action going on (in a dream sequence)

by Ursula K. Le Guin 4 years, 9 months ago

Stark landscapes spread on both sides of the road, like the bottom of the sea. It was March but there was still snow. Spared of leaved trees, the sky felt immense, even significant. Everything white, brown, or gray, stone colors.

breathtaking

—p.107 Jackpot (105) missing author 4 years, 9 months ago

Then, as if breathing, the sea swelled beneath us. If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once. That a woman on a sinking ship becomes a life raft—no matter how soft her skin. While I slept, he burned his last violin to keep my feet warm. He lay beside me and placed a word on the nape of my neck, where it melted into a bead of whiskey. Gold rust down my back. We had been sailing for months. Salt in our sentences. We had been sailing—but the edge of the world was nowhere in sight.

"salt in our sentences" is astoundingly good

—p.18 Immigrant Haibun (18) by Ocean Vuong 4 years, 8 months ago

The fog lifts. And we see it. The horizon—suddenly gone. An aqua sheen leading to the hard drop. Clean and merciful—just like he wanted. Just like the fairy tales. The one where the book closes and turns to laughter in our laps. I pull the mast to full sail. He throws my name into the air. I watch the syllables crumble into pebbles across the deck.

wow

—p.20 Immigrant Haibun (18) by Ocean Vuong 4 years, 8 months ago

Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining.

—p.49 On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (49) by Ocean Vuong 4 years, 8 months ago