The journal
A curated selection from the Moniqs archive, newest first. More stories are being moved over from the original site.
Literature · Reflection
“When my submission has been claimed, no longer in the name of love and friendship but by reason of some right or power, I have drawn upon the strength that is buried in my nature, I have straightened my shoulders and thrown off the yoke. I alone know the latent force hidden with
Read story
Literature · Reflection
“Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and ob
Read story
Literature · Reflection
“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.” Virginia Woolf
Read story
Literature · Reflection
“It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” ― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (1929-1945)
Read story
Literature · Reflection
” I must say that the experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away any remnants of the religious education that I had had…Auschwitz existed, therefore God cannot exist. I find no solution to that dilemma. I seek a solution, but I don’t find it. “ Primo Levi
Read story
Literature · Reflection
“I’m a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can’t and then tries the short story which is the most demanding form after poetry. And failing that, only then does he take up novel writing.” —William Faulkner
Read story
Literature · Reflection
“There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.” Marcel Proust
Read story
Literature · Reflection
“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” George Bernard Shaw
Read story
Literature · Reflection
“She wondered all the same how much they really had to say to one another, given that they had only this city in common and a similar way of talking, the same intonation, perhaps she’d just wanted to believe after that third whiskey on the roof garden at the Hilton that he would
Read story
Literature · Reflection
“You’re beautiful, but you’re empty…One couldn’t die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass
Read story
Literature · Reflection
“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations” Vladimir Nabokov Photograph of a young Nabokov with butterfly doodles by himself.
Read story
Literature · Reflection
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.” Eudora Welty Photo above Eudora Welty in the garden, weeding, in the 1940s. Photograph via Eudora Welty Foundation. Eudora Alice Welty (1909 – 2001) was an American author of short stories a
Read story
