nothingeverything.: Archive

“- But I don’t understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture? - He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.
- That,- said the Dean, - is the Parthenon.
- So it is.
- I haven’t the time to waste on silly questions.
- All right, then. - Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. - Shall I tell you what’s rotten about it?
- It’s the Parthenon! - said the Dean.
- Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!
The ruler struck the glass over the picture.
- Look,- said Roark. - The famous flutings on the famous columns – what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood – when columns were made of wood, only these aren’t, they’re marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?” —Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

Jan 31, 2011

Jan 31, 201128 notes

“I really think that everyone should have watercolors, magnetic poetry, and a harmonica.” — Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (via libraryland)

Jan 31, 2011141 notes

Jan 31, 2011913 notes

“I can’t get rid of books. It’s almost like having your thoughts [around you]. I want to be able to hold it. I want to be able to see where the pages have been turned down. I grew up in a house full of books. Wall to wall. I remember when I moved out of home, that was the big thing I couldn’t handle: there weren’t any books. Every inch of my mum’s house is covered in them and not having any was like, ‘This is really weird. This is such a sterile space without any stories in it.’” —Keira Knightley, Elle UK, 2011 March (via maced)

Jan 31, 20112,151 notes

Jan 31, 201149 notes

“I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know whether this world has meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.” —Albert Camus (via whentheyfight)

Jan 30, 20116 notes

“I wish for a moment that time would lift me out of this day, and into some more benign one. But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say “I’m sorry” until it is as meaningless air.” —The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (via thechocolatebrigade)

Jan 30, 201188 notes

“

what I liked about e. e. cummings
was that he cut away from
the holiness of the
word
and with charm
and gamble
gave us lines
that sliced through the
dung.

how it was needed!
how we were withering
away
in the old
tired
manner.

of course, then came all
the
e. e. cummings
copyists.
they copied him then
as the others had
copied Keats, Shelley,
Swinburne, Byron, et
al.

but there was only
one
e. e. cummings.
of course.

one sun.

one moon.

one poet,
like
that.

” —Charles Bukowski (via fatalistichues)

Jan 30, 20119 notes

Jan 30, 20112,301 notes

“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” —George Orwell, 1984 (via ish07)

Jan 30, 201111 notes

“Has anybody said publicly how nice it is to write on rubber with a ballpoint pen? The slow, fat, ink-rich line, rolled over a surface at once dense and yielding, makes for a multidimensional experience no single sheet of paper can offer.” —Nicholson Baker

Jan 29, 2011

Jan 29, 2011173 notes

“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion—that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.” —Mary Oliver on “staying alive” in Blue Pastures (via melancholynotes)

Jan 29, 201127 notes

“It’s creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.
What it’s going to be, I don’t know.
Even after all that rushing around, where we’ve ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
And maybe knowing isn’t the point.
Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.” —Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)

Jan 29, 20111 note

Thanks for following! I saw that you like Jeff Buckley, Gilmore Girls, books and Chuck, so I had to follow back! ;)

You just described my life’s natural highs in one sentence <3 Thanks for the follow back, your tumblr is beautiful <3

Jan 29, 2011

Jan 29, 20112 notes

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Jan 28, 20115 notes

“Why is love intensified by absence?” —Audrey Niffenegger (via ish07)

Jan 28, 20113 notes