We’re conditioned to think that our lives revolve around great moments. But great moments often catch us unaware – beautifully wrapped in what others may consider a small one.
—Kent Nerburn
Take away love and our earth is a tomb.
—Robert Browning (via pavorst)
And did I bid you remember that for each protagonist who once stepped on to the stage of so-called historical events, there were thousands, millions, who never entered the theatre - who never knew that the show was running - who got on with the donkey-work of coping with reality?
True, true. But it doesn’t stop there. Because each one of those numberless non-participants was doubtless concerned with raising in the flatness of his own unsung existence his own personal stage, his own props and scenery - for there are very few of us who can be, for any length of time, merely realistic. So there’s no escaping it: even if we miss the grand repertoire of history, we yet imitate it in miniature and endorse, in miniature, its longing for presence, for feature, for purpose, for content.
And there’s no saying what consequences we won’t risk, what reactions to our actions, what repercussions, what brick towers built to be knocked down, what chasings of our own tails, what chaos we won’t assent in order to assure ourselves that, none the less, things are happening. And there’s no saying what heady potions we won’t con cot, what meanings, myths, manias we won’t imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.
—Waterland, by Graham Swift
The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.
—Pearl S. Buck (via larmoyante)
Make everyday an assault on the commonplace
(Source: couragehopestrength, via dailystendhalnitesaudade)
But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
—Truman Capote, Other Voices, Other Rooms (via igotthenumberthirteenonmyneck)
I especially like the use of the word ‘burlesqued’.
(Source: bambi-no, via dailystendhalnitesaudade)
i am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.
—ernest hemingway (via ethaney)
Photos by James Huse. This is high-speed photography at its finest.
one line ruminations.
when you are in love with a writer you read with trepidation, either hoping that his words are about you, or fearing that they are not.
(via dailystendhalnitesaudade)
I’m a kind of paranoiac in reverse. I suspect people of plotting to make me happy.
—J.D. Salinger (via dailystendhalnitesaudade)
