May 2011
“And all the writings of Ruskin could not help her to accept the fact that in living, some things are just broken and therefore own their own beauty. In her garden full of ravenous rooks, in her dreams of kidnapped youths, in her study of frail and reread books, a flower that emerges to sprout over and over.”
—Jenny Boully (via holdonmagnolia)
“A wound gives off its own light surgeons say
if all of the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound by what shines from it.” — Anne Carson, from The Beauty of the Husband
(via dondante)
if all of the lamps in the house were turned out
you could dress this wound by what shines from it.” — Anne Carson, from The Beauty of the Husband
(via dondante)
“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape.”
—Ray Bradbury (via dondante)
“There is a logic [to my reading], but I can’t define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I’ll read them when they call me from the shelf.”
—Aleksandar Hemon (via aperfectcommotion)
“Sometimes I walk past small shops, perhaps in the rue de Seine. Dealers in antiques or engravings, or small antiquarian booksellers with overflowing display windows. No one ever goes in, it’s obvious that they don’t do any business. But if one looks inside they are sitting, sitting and reading, unconcerned; not worried about tomorrow, not anxious about success, have a dog sitting before them, happy, or a cat that makes the silence still larger as it slinks along the rows of books as if it were flicking the names off the spines. Ah, if that were enough: I would sometimes wish to buy such a full display window and sit behind it with a dog for twenty years.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)
“I think the names of colors are at the edge between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful.”
—A. S. Byatt (via human-voices)
“I heard a man say a poem once,
he said ‘All that lives is holy.’” —
he said ‘All that lives is holy.’” —
—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
(via ahuntersheart)
“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river
but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he’s still left with his hands.” —Boot Theory by Richard Siken (via thedaysarenotfullenough) (via libraryland)
but then he’s still left
with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away
but then he’s still left with his hands.” —Boot Theory by Richard Siken (via thedaysarenotfullenough) (via libraryland)
“If someone told me that I could live my life again free of depression provided I was willing to give up the gifts depression has given me—the depth of awareness, the expanded consciousness, the increased sensitivity, the awareness of limitation, the tenderness of love, the meaning of friendship, the apreciation of life, the joy of a passionate heart—I would say, ‘This is a Faustian bargain! Give me my depressions. Let the darkness descend. But do not take away the gifts that depression, with the help of some unseen hand, has dredged up from the deep ocean of my soul and strewn along the shores of my life. I can endure darkness if I must; but I cannot live without these gifts. I cannot live without my soul.”
—David N. Elkins (via human-voices)
“Of course you should study whatever subject you want. The written appreciation and understanding of literature, or any kind of artistic endeavor, is absolutely central to a decent society. Why d’you think books are the first things that the fascists burn?”
—Starter for Ten by David Nicholls. (via owlssayhooot)
Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsburg sitting with Jack Kerouac, at his grave.
I love these men.
