June 2008
26 posts
“In retrospect, I realise that fate was a ladder on which, at the time, I could not afford to miss a single rung. To skip out on even one scene would have meant never making it to the top, although it would have been by far the easier choice. What motivated me was probably the little light still left in my half-dead heart, glittering in the darkness. Yet without it, perhaps, I might have slept better.”
—Moonlight Shadow, Banana Yoshimoto (via crowned)
“The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Wisdom of the Sands
“When you long with all your heart for someone to love you, a madness grows there that shakes all sense from the trees and the water and the earth. And nothing lives for you, except the long deep bitter want. And this is what everyone feels from birth to death.”
—Denton Welch (journal, 8 May 1944, 11:15 pm) (via into)
“How nice—to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
“Everyone loves / the Dream but I kill it.”
—Mark Danielewski, Only Revolutions (via into)
“Any idiot can face a crisis — it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out”
—Anton Chekhov (via the Message Board at The Original Pancake House) (via imlendc)
“In a vivid insight, a flash of black lightning, he saw that all life was parallel: that evolution was not vertical, ascending to perfection, but horizontal. Time was the great fallacy; existence was without history, was always now, was always this being caught in the same fiendish machine. All those painted screens erected by man to shut out reality - history, religion, duty, social position, all were illusions, mere opium fantasies.”
—John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
—Richard Wright, American Hunger
“His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.)”
—George Orwell, Shooting an Elephant
“For when one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a dream and an illusion. What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned like fire? What are the incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things? The things that one has done oneself. No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet master. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us, with bitterness and disappointment in its train. We come across some noble grief that we think will lend the purple dignity of tragedy to our days, but it passes away from us, and things less noble take its place, and one some grey windy dawn, or odorous eve of silence and of silver, we find ourselves looking with callous wonder, or dull heart of stone, at the tress of gold-flecked hair that we had once so wildly worshipped and so madly kissed.”
—Oscar Wilde, The Artist As A Critic
