“It’s strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.”
—T. S. Eliot
juillet 2011
You post such beautiful things. <3
I’ve been meaning to tell you the same. ♥
“He was dark, he was filled with stories like the serpent in myths; each white tooth contained a story and each story a hundred others, they were all within him, intertwined, sleeping. The stranger, flashing with legends, he cannot be overcome. Once they have escaped him, these hymns, these jokes, these lies join with air, they are breathed, they cannot be filtered out. He is like the prow of a ship cutting through seas of sleep. Silence is mysterious, but stories fill us like the sun.”
—James Salter, Light Years
“there have been times when i think we do not desire heaven but more often i find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. you may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. you know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you’ve been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw – but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you were transported. even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of – something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cutwood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? you have never had it. all the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. but if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘here at last is the thing i was made for.’ we cannot tell each other about it. it is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. while we are, this is. if we lose this, we lose all.”
—c. s. lewis, the problem of pain, 1940
“Why does one feel so different at night? Why is it so exciting to be awake when everybody else is asleep? Late—it is very late! And yet every moment you feel more and more wakeful, as though you were slowly, almost with every breath, waking up into a new, wonderful, far more thrilling and exciting world than the daylight one. And what is this queer sensation that you’re a conspirator? Lightly, stealthily you move about your room. You take something off the dressing-table and put it down again without a sound. And everything, even the bed-post, knows you, responds, shares your secret…”
—Katherine Mansfield, “At the Bay,” in The Garden Party, 1922
“What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. … I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.”
— Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835
“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others—the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the mid-afternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer
“I met a wonderful new man! He’s fictional, but you can’t have everything.”
—The Purple Rose of Cairo | Woody Allen
“The truth that lies closest, however, is only this, that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell.”
—Franz Kafka, Diaries (1911-1923)
“He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.”
—Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)
“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.”
—Virginia Woolf
“
I did not know what to say to him. I felt awkward and blundering. I did not know how I could reach him, where I could overtake him and go on hand in hand with him once more.
It is such a secret place, the land of tears.
” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry | The Little Prince
“The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between this profusion of matter and the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.”
—André Malraux, Les Noyers de l’Altenburg
“You can listen to silence… and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.”
—Chaim Potok (The Chosen)
“this was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is The Night
“I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“my tears are like the quiet drift of petals from some magic rose; and all my grief flows from the rift of unremembered skies and snows. i think that if i touched the earth, it would crumble; it is so sad and beautiful, so tremulously like a dream.”
—Dylan Thomas
Hello, I saw that one of your favourite bands is Joy Divison, what are your favourite songs by them, lovely? Hope you're well. x
Basically all of them. I really like Shadowplay, Glass, Insight, These Days, Digital, Colony, Isolation, Interzone, Failures, Day of the Lords, Heart and Soul, The Kill, Wilderness, New Dawn Fades, She’s Lost Control, The Only Mistake, Candidate, No Love Lost, Incubation, Twenty Four Hours, Ice Age, Transmission, Something Must Break, Dead Souls, etc. Sorry if that was a lot.
“Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the empty cavern. There was an abnormal lightness to my body, and sounds had a hollow echo to them.”
—Haruki Murakami
“I wasn’t lonely.
I experienced no self-pity.
I was just caught up in a
life in which
I could find no
meaning.” —Charles Bukowski
I experienced no self-pity.
I was just caught up in a
life in which
I could find no
meaning.” —Charles Bukowski
“Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon’s reflection.”
—Rumi
“Desolate dreams pursue me out of sleep;
Weeping I wake; waking, I weep, I weep.” —edna st. vincent millay
Weeping I wake; waking, I weep, I weep.” —edna st. vincent millay
“In public, I become afraid that people can see the ‘real’ me, the me that I see and not the person I portray. I become very self-conscious of any person looking at me and I project my own thoughts of myself onto them.”
—Rose
“I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself- as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to define myself.”
—Haruki Murakami
“My whole life has been nothing but futile wandering and pursuits, a great deal of talk without meaning.”
—Ingmar Bergman
“I think of us more as flowers in the attic. Paper flowers. Born so brightly colored, and fading duller through all those long, grim, dreary, nightmarish days…”
—V.C. Andrews
“You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”
—Carl Sagan
Your blog is supreme, but you already knew this.
haha no I don’t. Thank you. ♥
“I am occasionally loveable but for the most part I’m like loving a raincloud.”
—Sara Quin
“Isolation made me in its own image. The presence of another person - one person is all it takes - immediately slows down my thinking and, just as in a normal person contact with others acts as a stimulus to expression and speech, in me that contact acts as a counter-stimulus, if such a word exists. When I’m alone I can come up with endless bon mots, acerbic ripostes to remarks no one has made, sociable flashes of wit exchanged with no one; but all this disappears when I’m confronted by another human being. I lose all my intelligence, I lose the power of speech and after a while all I feel like doing is sleeping. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my spectral and imagined friends, only the conversations I have in dreams, have reality and substance and in them the spirit is present like an image in a mirror.”
—Fernando Pessoa
“I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting.”
—J.D. Salinger
“So I’ll cry these tears of ink and let them spill over the paper in your hands. So you can read the pain you fail to see, the pain you fail to feel. I hope that as you mouth the words, etched deeply by hand, you’ll finally grasp what it is that troubles me. And no, It is not the fact that you don’t listen to me, I’ve grown use to not being heard. It is not the way you lust after others, infedelity doesn’t phase me. Neither is it the fact that your work has always come first, I’ve always admired your ambition. It is however the way you fail to love me. After the many years we’ve spent together I’m still waiting for you to fall with me. Because when I look into your eyes, glazed over and cloudy, I see my own love reflected back, love for you and none for myself.”
—Whimsical Enlightenment: Reflective Love
“I’ve been living alone for so long, everything about me is private. I’m surprised anyone’s able to understand a word I say.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
I reblog you very often and love your tumblr, but i think i never dropped by to say it, so here i am.
you post such beautiful things, my dear.
hope you're having a good day / night.
Thank you. I hope you’re doing well, too. ♥
your blog is gorgeous. it's my all time favorite. sorry i reblog so much. ♥
Thank you so much. I don’t mind at all, reblog all you like. x
“I may not lead the most dramatic life, but in my brain it’s war and peace everyday.”
—Rufus Wainwright
“I felt that night, on the stage, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone. I wondered, for the first time in my life, if life was worth all the work it took to live. What exactly made it worth it? What’s so horrible about being dead forever, and not feeling anything, and not even dreaming? What’s so great about feeling and dreaming?”
—Jonathan Safran Foer
“He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about… like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“The whole world seemed a maze of shifting mirrors in which I wandered alone, looking always and frenziedly for the exit back into my real life, where people had substance, did as they said they would, and were whole.”
—Claire Messud, The Last Life
“The nicest thing for me is sleep, then at least I can dream.”
—Marilyn Monroe
“‘So many stars. It’s awfully pretty.’ I raised my head to look at the sky. The stars in the deep, cold heavens were like small cuts from an explosion; flowing out from them was silver blood, and if I’d had wings I’d have flown up there to kiss each one.”
—Wei Hui (Shanghai Baby)
“It’s so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That’s above and beyond everything else, and it’s not a mental complaint-it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don’t come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people’s words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.”
—Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
“Imagine immortality, where even a marriage of fifty years would feel like a one-night stand. Imagine seeing trends and fashions blur past you. Imagine the world more crowded and desperate every century. Imagine changing religions, homes, diets, careers, until none of them have any real value.Imagine traveling the world until you’re bored with every square inch. Imagine your emotions, your loves and hates and rivalries and victories, played out again and again until life is nothing more than a melo-dramatic soap opera. Until you regard the birth and death of other people with no more emotion than the wilted cut flowers you throw away.”
—Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk
“When I was a girl I would look out my bedroom window at the caterpillars; I envied them so much. No matter what they were before, no matter what happened to them, they could just hide away and turn into these beautiful creatures that could fly away completely untouched.”
—Patch Adams
I love your blog~
Thank you so much. I love yours, it’s one of the best. ♥
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, and Hell of Heaven.”
—John Milton
“How I yearn to throw myself into endless space and float above the awful abyss.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“I am an expert at speaking while barely saying a word; I’ve been speaking without saying a word all my life, and have endured whole inner tragedies without saying a word.”
—Dostoevsky
“If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.”
—Brideshead Revisited, 1945
Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh
