Originally Posted By vashti
People speak sometimes about the “bestial” cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts, no animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(Source: vashti, via i-sing-the-body-eclectic)
3,843 notes
The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.
Jane Austen
For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1848. I have posted this quote before, and will repeat it till I canneh blog no more, because it is always always true.
Youth rules the world, but only when it is no longer young. It is tarnished, travestied youth that is in the saddle, in the person of middle age. Old age lives in the delusion that it has improved and rationalized its youthful ideas by experience and stored up wisdom, when all it has done is to damage them—more or less—usually more. And the tragedy of life is that the world is run by those damaged ideals.
Randolph Bourne, 1913
Revolutions do not take place in velvet boxes. They never have. It is only the poets who make them lovely.
Carl Oglesby, 1965
He’s always sneering at someone else, always looking for the worst weakness in everyone. But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can’t help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.
Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
(Reading this for the first time right now…decided to start on my “summer book” early. Totally not because I wanted to avoid doing real school work.)
Originally Posted By mindlessmeandering
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
(Source: mindlessmeandering, via photographerinthefunnyhat)
Kiss me. Two lips kissing two lips: openness is ours again. Our “world.” And the passage from the inside out, from the outside in, the passage between us, is limitless. Without end. No knot or loop, no mouth ever stops our exchanges. Between us the house has no walls, the clearing no enclosure, language no circularity. When you kiss me, the world grows so large that the horizon itself disappears. Are we unsatisfied? Yes, if that means we are never finished. If our pleasure consists in moving, being moved, endlessly.Always in motion: openness is never spent nor sated.
Luce Irigaray, When Our Lips Speak Together (1977)
Les hommes sont tous condamnes a mort avec des sursis indefinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among the children of this world, in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only to be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments sake.
Walter Pater
A kite is a victim you are sure of. You love it because it pulls.
Leonard Cohen
Originally Posted By goldenfools
You’re all geniuses, and you’re all beautiful. You don’t need anyone to tell you who you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace, think peace, and live peace and breathe peace
John Lennon (via suzywire)
(Source: goldenfools)
…but check your lease, man, ‘cause you’re living in fuck city.
gob bluth
