May 2012
1 post
“That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut...”
– Paulo Coelho
February 2012
1 post
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and...”
– David Foster Wallace
January 2012
14 posts
Happiness →
growing-orbits:
Again I’m trying to explain how all talk is slippery.
See, I might want to convey one thing—frustration, say— but all that gets conveyed is some other thing—rage—my hand coming fast, erratic, menacing.
Who can say how a thing in words turns and flowers like that? It happens.
Now say I want to say to you happiness.
No motive. Nothing behind it. Just the awareness of a...
“Sometimes I lie awake at night and I ask, “Is life a multiple choice test or is...”
– Charles M. Schulz (via teachingliteracy)
“It’s true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don’t meet shape us...”
– “Tiger, Tiger” by Simon Van Booy (from The Secret Lives of People in Love) (via wearebasiclight)
“Time really is one big continuous cloth - We habitually cut out pieces of time...”
– From The Rat’s Second Letter (A Wild Cheep Chase)
“Wonder is the desire of knowledge.”
– Thomas Aquinas
“You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase:...”
– Henri-Frédéric Amiel (via funeral)
“It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.”
– Wallace Stevens, from “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” (via the-final-sentence)
“I think it’s very healthy to spend time alone. You need to know how to be alone...”
– Oscar Wilde (via rachelsgarden)
the bends
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should, even something you’ve worked for years to attain, which prompts you to plug in various thought combinations to try for anything more than static emotional blankness, as if your heart had been accidentally demagnetized by a surge of expectations.
“Why be timid? Death is coming.”
– S. Amstell (via 1000scientists)
topographe:
I’m going crazy. Trying to protect everyone around me from the storm raging in my head. I need a new place to be.
Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June’s long days, and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You’ve seen the refugees heading nowhere, you’ve heard the executioners sing...
“i mean, they say you die twice. one time when you stop breathing and a second...”
– banksy
poorlywrittenhistory:
I keep forgetting to mention the part where I miss you.
July 2011
7 posts
jenna2step:
Summer has always been some sort of inevitable gateway—entrances and exits, the world swelling bright and early in the mornings with some sort of strange promise. Tall grass slapping at your knees. Lake hair and warm air crawling up the back of your neck; something new but nostalgic. Everything all at once.
I hope, if anything, this catches your ear. I hope you get out there in this...
aimonomia
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. fear that learning the name of something—a bird, a constellation, an attractive stranger—will somehow ruin it, transforming a lucky discovery into a conceptual husk pinned in a glass case, which leaves one less mystery to flutter around your head, trying to get in.
“Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the silence of...”
– Richard Brautigan
“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day...”
– John Lubbock
“The reason why the philosopher can be compared to the poet is that both are...”
– St. Thomas Aquinas
“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her...”
– The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
Ode
vulpecula:
We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams, Wandering by lone sea-breakers, And sitting by desolate streams;— World-losers and world-forsakers, On whom the pale moon gleams: Yet we are the movers and shakers Of the world for ever, it seems.
Arthur O’Shaughnessy
June 2011
2 posts
“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I...”
– Jhumpa Lahiri (via aleatoricism)
“I like people too much or not at all.”
– Sylvia Plath
May 2011
6 posts
being friends with a writer →
thepocketmouse:
Pros: Sometimes they use words like ajar and diminutive and prepossessing in real conversations and get funny looks and you can poke fun at their little slip in cover. You know exactly where to find them when they go missing from society: bookshops and in the quiet section of the library. Conversations sound nicer. Exchanging letters sound nicer. Words between you two always...
“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is...”
– Dead Poets Society, 1989
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
– L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (via foxandfayvel)
“I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.”
– Jonathan Safran Foer (via trua)
“I wanted the whole world or nothing.”
– Charles Bukowski, Post Office (via henrycharlesbukowski)
“I am confused
There are words I’d like to use
But they’ve all been said before”
– I Me You, Jim Noir (via foxandfayvel)
April 2011
9 posts
“I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect....”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald (via mydreamsthestars)
“The world is comic to those who think and tragic to those who feel.”
– Horace Walpole, 1769 (via lostlittlewonder)
“Neoteny” is “remaining young, ” and it may be ironic that it is so little known,...”
– (Robbins, Tom (1980) Still Life With Woodpecker.
The Midnight Nation: Neoteny
(via sealegslegssea)
“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
– John Muir
“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes...”
– Henry Rollins
“I must before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me,...”
– Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (1959)
“…The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,...”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“We talked for hours. He talked and I listened. It was like wind and sunlight. It...”
– John Fowles, The Collector (via nocternity)
“Oh, I can’t explain. When I like people immensely, I never tell their names to...”
– Oscar Wilde: Basil Hallward, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890
March 2011
1 post
1 tag
“Set yourself on fire, and the whole world will come to watch you burn.”
– John Wesley
January 2011
6 posts
So you want to be a writer →
technicoloring:
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don’t do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don’t do it. if you’re doing it for money or fame, don’t do it. if you’re doing it because you...
“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
– Scaramouche, 1921
Rafael Sabatini
“A story is like a letter. Dear You, I’ll say. Just You, without a name....”
– Margaret Atwood
vulpecula: Insomnia →
vulpecula:
The moon in the bureau mirror looks out a million miles (and perhaps with pride, at herself, but she never, never smiles) far and away beyond sleep, or perhaps she’s a daytime sleeper.
By the Universe deserted, she’d tell it to go to hell, and she’d find a body of water, or a mirror, on which to dwell. So wrap up care in a cobweb and drop it down the well
into that world inverted...
“My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and...”
– Henry David Thoreau
“I think of my body as a side effect of my mind.”
– Carrie Fisher (via libraryland)
November 2010
1 post
“…Among us, right now, are seminal works of art masquerading as the...”
–
Michael Cunningham
September 2010
3 posts
“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of...”
– J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (via vulpecula)
“There is nothing of any interest for me out there, on Earth, at all.”
–
Sherlock Holmes