“Four billion people on this earth
but my imagination is still the same.
It’s bad with large numbers.
It’s still taken by particularity.
It flits in the dark like a flashlight,
illuminating only random faces
while all the rest go by,
never coming to mind and never really missed.”
– Wisława Szymborska
“How can we remain true to ourselves without becoming infinitely arrogant and extravagant? People want us to fit in without complaint, and we are completely ridiculous in the solitude we want to preserve—and we cannot justify that. It is not that we fear what we are experiencing, but rather the dreadful result: that after the lived experience we will become numb and assume the same cowardly gesture unto eternity. I hope you won’t be annoyed if these words, which could be uttered only from my point of view, failed to touch on anything of importance to you, if I made the mistake of keeping my remarks too general. But you will surely agree with me that everything depends on our not allowing any of our warmth for people to be taken from us. Even if, for a while, we must preserve this warmth in a less expressive and more abstract way, it willendure and surely find its form.”
– Walter Benjamin, from aletter to Carla Seligson
“The ego says, ‘I shouldn’t have to suffer,’ and that thought makes you suffer so much more. It is a distortion of the truth, which is always paradoxical. The truth is that you need to say yes to suffering before you can transcend it.”
– Eckhart Tolle
“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”
– P.G. Wodehouse
“We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.”
– C.S. Lewis, The Weight of The Glory
“In a male-supremacist society, female power must logically appear illogical, mysterious, intimate, threatening. “Witch” stands for all those unnamable shadow acts of disappearance and withdrawal, self-cultivation, and self-medication that elude the social and sexual order”
– Editors’ Note: Witches
“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful…and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”
– Zadie Smith, On Beauty
“We don’t just need to be rescued from loving the wrong things. We need to be rescued from loving the right things in the wrong way.”
– B.B. // Finding Our Way Home
“You have to create something from nothing.”
– Ralph Lauren
“Do you still perform autopsies on conversations you had lives ago?”
– Donte Collins
“I’m still learning to love the parts of me that no one claps for.”
– Rudy Francisco
“People with yuan fen are destined to like one another;
Friendship develops even if a thousand miles apart.
But should yuan fen be absent between two individuals,
They will remain strangers despite sitting face-to-face.”
– Adeline Yen Mah
“A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words.”
– Orhan Pamuk
“
He says ‘I don’t get it, why are you still a virgin at 24?’
He says ‘I don’t believe you, I’ve seen you walk, virgins don’t walk like that’
He says, ‘That ain’t natural, people are supposed to fuck.’
He asks ‘Why though? No offence though.’
I ask ‘When was your first time?’
He says ‘I was 12’
He says ‘I know what you’re thinking, that’s too young.’
I look at his knuckles, he has two good hands.
He says ‘She was older than me.’
I ask ‘How old?’
And he says ‘It’s better that the girl is older, that’s how I learnt all things I know’
He licks his lips.
I ask again ‘How old?’
He says ‘I could use one finger to make you sob’
I think of my brother in prison and I can’t remember his face.
I ask again ‘How old?’
He says ‘Boys become men in the laps of women, you know?’
I think of my mother’s face lined with her bad choices in men.
He says ‘If you were mine you wouldn’t get away with this shit, I’d eat you for hours, I’d gut you like fruit.’
I think of my cousin’s circumcision, how he feels like a mermaid, not human from the waist down.
He says ‘I’d look after you, you know?’
I laugh, I ask for the last time ‘How old?’
He says ‘34.’
He says ‘She was beautiful though and I know what you’re thinking but it’s not like that, I’m a man, I’m a man, I’m a man. No one could ever hurt me’.
”
– Warsan Shire, Crude Conversations With Boys Who Fake Laughter Often
“Everyone returns us to a different sense of ourselves, for we become a little of who they think we are.”
– Alain de Botton - On Love.
“My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.”
– Fernando Pessoa
“Perfume is decidedly not about two things: it isn’t about memory and it isn’t about sex. Perfume is about beauty and intellect. A perfume is a message in a bottle—not a smell—and the message is written by the perfumer and read by the person who smells it.”
– Biophysicist, writer, and fragrance industry legend Luca Turin
“I am a writer of fiction and so I am a liar too and invent from what I know and that I’ve heard. I’m a liar. My excuse is that I make the truth as I invent it truer than it would be. That is what makes good writers or bad.”
– Ernest Hemingway, from True At First Light
“If the dead are watching, I want them to see us writing, dancing, singing, painting. I want them to see that we still reach out to each other.”
– Richard Siken, ‘Black Telephone’
“Hipster economics are standard economics because hipsters are everything the US economy has ever wished for in one convenient package. It’s a group consisting largely of young, upper-middle class people with very little conviction, who will spend large amounts of money to maintain their own comfort and the appearance of diversity and rebellion. They are activists as long as it’s easy, poor as long as it doesn’t involve dirt or hunger, and selfless as long as they don’t stand to lose anything. They represent the sanitizing of national issues so that they can be discussed without being addressed. And all you have to do to control them is use some reverse psychology. They’re not rebels, they’re not even malicious, because they’re not anything except a bunch of kids playing pretend. They’ll eventually grow up and become bankers, lawyers and politicians, just like their parents…”
– Top comment by “Robert” on The Peril of Hipster Economics
“It’s not hard to decide what you want your life to be about. What’s hard, she said, is figuring out what you’re willing to give up in order to do the things you really care about.”
– Bittersweet, Shauna Niequist
“Romance is tempestuous. Love is calm.”
– Mason Cooley
“Never cut what you can untie.”
– Joseph Joubert
“When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four AM and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10 km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing, I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. … Writing is like a survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.”
– Haruki Murakami
“Stop apologizing to men for not wanting to sit them with, drink with them, dance with them, go home with them. You have not been put on this earth for their pleasure, their entertainment, to help them feel a little less lonely at night. If you do not want someone, are not interested in someone, don’t apologize. You do not have to be forgiven for the sake of someone else’s feelings. All you have to worry about is your own.
If you’re dating someone and they cheat on you with the girl sitting across them from the bar, or anyone for that matter, do not ask their name, why they did it, and if it was worth it. Just leave. Do not swear your revenge, or that you find the one who broke your relationship because the person who broke your trust is sitting right in front of you. The person who ruined what you had is the one who promised that they never would. Do not fixate yourself on what you should have or could have done, but what you will do, which is leave. You gave them a chance and now they can see it walk out the door.
You’re going to make mistakes and that’s inevitable, but what isn’t is making those same mistakes twice. You are supposed to learn from the pain, supposed to take it into your hands, hang it on your wall to remind yourself that you will never let it happen again. It’s hard stopping others from repeating their tragedies, but when it comes to your own, you are in control.
Love as many as you want. Kiss as many as you want. Fuck as many as you want. But when you do these things do it with all of you. Do it because you know it will show you something, help you with something, make sense of things. Never do a task that was assigned by someone else if you are not interested, not comfortable, unwilling. You can do anything you want to do as long as you know that there is only understanding and truth behind it. Never settle, never give in and never do anything that you don’t want to just because you feel bad.
Learn to say no. Learn to fight. Learn the difference between love and lust and learn to love yourself. If you love yourself, when you’re alone, you won’t need the presence of another just to make you feel at ease. You’ll have the power of healing in your very own body. You’re beautiful, remember that, write it down, scream it out loud and never forget. You have the entire world inside of your hands and the only thing you truly need to know to push through these trying times is that you can do anything. Now do it.”
– "Tips for girls who are still growing up," - Colleen Brown
“Sometimes, in order to move on, you got to find a new addiction to get over another.”
– jenn satsune
“Chic, is first, when you don’t have to prove you have money, either because you have a lot and it doesn’t matter or because you don’t have any and it doesn’t matter. Chic is not aspirational. Chic is the most impossible thing to define. Luxury is a humorless thing, largely, and when humor happens in luxury it happens involuntarily. Chic is all about humor. Which means chic is about intelligence. And there has to be oddness— most luxury is conformist, and chic cannot be. Chic must be polite and not incommode others, but within that it can be as weird as it wants.”
– Luca Turin
“It is true when you are by yourself and you think about life, it is always sad. All that excitement and so on has a way of suddenly leaving you, and it’s as though, in the silence, somebody called your name, and you heard your name for the first time.”
– Katherine Mansfield, from Bliss, And Other Short Stories
“[L]et us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and poetry are opposed is a delusion. … On the contrary science opens up realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is a blank. Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. Whoever will dip into Hugh Miller’s works on geology, or read Mr. Lewes’s “Seaside Studies,” will perceive that science excites poetry rather than extinguishes it. And whoever will contemplate the life of Goethe will see that the poet and the man of science can co-exist in equal activity. Is it not, indeed, an absurd and almost a sacrilegious belief that the more a man studies Nature the less he reveres it? Think you that a drop of water, which to the vulgar eye is but a drop of water, loses anything in the eye of the physicist who knows that its elements are held together by a force which, if suddenly liberated, would produce a flash of lightning? Think you that what is carelessly looked upon by the uninitiated as a mere snow-flake, does not suggest higher associations to one who has seen through a microscope the wondrously varied and elegant forms of snow-crystals? Think you that the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded. Whoever has not in youth collected plants and insects, knows not half the halo of interest which lanes and hedge-rows can assume. Whoever has not sought for fossils, has little idea of the poetical associations that surround the places where imbedded treasures were found. Whoever at the seaside has not had a microscope and aquarium, has yet to learn what the highest pleasures of the seaside are. Sad, indeed, is it to see how men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the grandest phenomena—care not to understand the architecture of the universe, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots!—are learnedly critical over a Greek ode, and pass by without a glance that grand epic… upon the strata of the Earth!”
– Herbert Spencer
“Art exists because life is not enough.”
– Ferreira Gullar
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