“The art of living is more like wrestling than like dancing.”
—Marcus Aurelius
février 2012
“Interacting with other people does not come naturally to me; it is a strain and requires effort, and since it does not come naturally I feel like I am not really myself when I make that effort. I feel fairly comfortable with my family, but even with them I sometimes feel the strain of not being alone.”
—Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
“Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose.”
—Eckhart Tolle
“Time is an element in our brain which by the means of duration gives a semblance of reality to the absolutely empty existence of things and ourselves.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer, The Emptiness Of Existence
“世の中を 憂しとやさしと おもへども 飛び立ちかねつ 鳥にしあらねば
I feel the life is / sorrowful and unbearable / though / I can’t flee away / since I am not a bird” —Yamanoue no Okura
I feel the life is / sorrowful and unbearable / though / I can’t flee away / since I am not a bird” —Yamanoue no Okura
“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson
“My soul
is an empty
carousel at
sunset” —Pablo Neruda
is an empty
carousel at
sunset” —Pablo Neruda
“I’ve lived so little that I tend to imagine I’m not going to die; it seems improbable that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.”
—Michel Houellebecq, Whatever
“O time, thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me to untie!” —William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
It is too hard a knot for me to untie!” —William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
“I am either lacerated or ill at ease
and occasionally subject to gusts of life” —Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard
and occasionally subject to gusts of life” —Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard
“I often carry things to read so that I will not have to look at the people.”
—Charles Bukowski
“Consciousness is nature’s nightmare.”
—Emil Cioran, Tears and Saints
“It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life.”
—Charles Bukowski
“What is music? How can one define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, a rustling of summer foliage. Music is the distant peal of bells at eventide. Music is born only of the heart and it appeals to the heart. It is love. The sister of music is poetry and the mother — sorrow!”
—Sergei Rachmaninoff
“I’d like to run away, to flee from what I know, from what is mine, from what I love. I want to set off, not for some impossible Indies or for the great islands that lie far to the south of all other lands, but for anywhere, be it village or desert, that has the virtue of not being here. What I want is not to see these faces, this daily round of days. I want a rest from, to be other than, my habitual pretending. I want to feel the approach of sleep as if it were a promise of life, not rest. A hut by the sea, even a cave on a rugged mountain ledge would be enough. Unfortunately, my will alone cannot give me that.”
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. Margaret Jull Costa
“Because of their narcissism, geniuses are often solitary and friendless. “I have no friends,” said Michelangelo, “need none, and will have none”; Michelangelo was said to be “lonely as a hangman.” A woman who knew Kierkegaard and Ibsen said, “I have never seen in any other two persons, male or female, so marked a compulsion to be alone.”
—L. James Hammond, Conversations With Great Thinkers
Reblog if you believe in Sherlock Holmes.
“Sometimes I think I have given out my love to too many ideas and places and books and films, and have not saved enough for people.”
—
April Xiong, “Where I Write #21: On the Edge of Sky and Sea”
“I felt dumb and subdued. Every time I tried to concentrate, my mind glided off, like a skater, into a large empty space, and pirouetted there, absently.”
—Sylvia Plath
“I dream about oblivion like other people dream of good sex.”
—Alice B. Sheldon
“I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
—Kerouac
“What is this self inside us, this silent observer,
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us on to futile activity
And in the end, judge us still more severely
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?” —T. S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman
Severe and speechless critic, who can terrorize us
And urge us on to futile activity
And in the end, judge us still more severely
For the errors into which his own reproaches drove us?” —T. S. Eliot, The Elder Statesman
“Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?”
—Julia (Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh)
texting me is like ordering something online because most likely you won’t hear back for 4-6 business days
“You see, I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
“I am afraid of getting older … I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day—spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free…. I want, I want to think, to be omniscient…. I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.’”
—Sylvia Plath, written in 1949 at age 17
“Death comes to me again, a girl
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
It’s not so terrible she tells me,
not like you think, all darkness
and silence. There are windchimes
and the smell of lemons, some days
it rains, but more often the air is dry
and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.” —Dorriane Laux
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
It’s not so terrible she tells me,
not like you think, all darkness
and silence. There are windchimes
and the smell of lemons, some days
it rains, but more often the air is dry
and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.” —Dorriane Laux
“I cannot contribute anything to this world because I only have one method: agony.”
—Emil Cioran
“Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play… I tell you, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.”
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack in will.”
— Vince Lombardi
“In a place far away from anyone or anywhere, I drifted off for a moment.”
—Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
“I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.”
—Charles Bukowski
“When it comes, you’ll be dreaming
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.” —Wislawa Szymborska, from “I’m Working on the World” in Poems New and Collected, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.” —Wislawa Szymborska, from “I’m Working on the World” in Poems New and Collected, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh
“There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold, vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable depths. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men’s calendars the tides of far spheres that bore him gently to join the course of other cycles that tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore, a green shore fragrant with lotus blossoms and starred by red camalates…”
—H.P. Lovecraft
“Food, fire, walks, dreams, cold, sleep, love, slowness, time, quiet, books, seasons – all these things, which are not really things, but moments of life – take on a different quality at night-time, where the moon reflects the light of the sun, and we have time to reflect what life is to us, knowing that it passes, and that every bit of it, in its change and its difference, is the here and now of what we have.
Life is too short to be all daylight. Night is not less; it’s more.” —Jeanette Winterson, from Why I adore the night
Life is too short to be all daylight. Night is not less; it’s more.” —Jeanette Winterson, from Why I adore the night
“Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears, the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence.”
—Alan Watts
“There are times when I so hate myself that I’m tearing at the walls inside my own brain, while my mouth is wittering away in some amusing fashion about whatever it is.”
—Stephen Fry
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
—Rabindranath Tagore
“I don’t owe people anything, and I don’t have to talk to them any more than I feel I need to.”
— Ned Vizzini, It’s Kind of a Funny Story
“And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.”
—John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.”
—Oscar Wilde
“For some nights I slept profoundly; but still every morning I felt the same lassitude, and a languor weighed upon me all day. I felt myself a changed girl. A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.”
—Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
“I often feel like I want to think something but I can’t find the language that coincides with the thoughts, so it remains felt, not thought. Sometimes I feel like I’m thinking in Swedish without knowing Swedish.”
—Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You, Peter Cameron
“She sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all ; she forgot that she had any fingers to raise. The things that existed were so immense and so desolate. She continued to be conscious of these vast masses of substance for a long stretch of time, the clock still ticking in the midst of the universal silence.”
—Virginia Woolf,The Voyage Out.
Franz Schubert - trio no
Franz Schubert
Piano Trio No.2, Franz Schubert
“Last year nothing happened, the year before nothing happened, and the year before that nothing happened. To wait. In our lives we know joy, anger, sorrow, and a hundred other emotions, but these emotions all together occupy a bare one percent of our time. The remaining ninety-nine percent is just living in waiting. I wait in momentary expectation, feeling as though my breasts are being crushed, for the sound in the corridor of the footsteps of happiness. Empty. Oh, life is too painful, the reality that confirms the universal belief that it is best not to be born.”
— Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun (1947)
“When you worship dead flowers it’s hard to love people.”
—David Tibet
