March 2012
77 posts
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“He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him see the works.”
―Dashiell Hammett
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“This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don’t like at all and would like to avoid. It’s not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it’s not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it?...
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“Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.”
-Arthur Schopenhauer
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“Maybe that’s what Hell is. You go mad. And all your demons come and get you just as fast as you can think them up.”
-Anne Rice
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“I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe. I can still love passionately without believing. That means I love humanly. I wept because from now on I will weep less. I wept because I have lost my pain and I am not yet accustomed to its absence.”
-Anais Nin
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“What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon become just words...
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“She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as...
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What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!
-NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
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“Normally seven minutes of another person’s company was enough to give her a...”
– Stieg Larsson (via misswallflower)
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“What he had really wanted to do was to tear a hole in his world and escape.”
– -Vladimir Nabokov, “Symbols and Signs” (via awritersruminations)
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vintageanchor:
“Sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don’t know why we are sad, so we say we aren’t sad but we really are.”
― Mark Haddon
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“Friends, in the middle of this life, I was embraced
By failure. It clung to me...”
– Larry Levis, from The Two Trees (via polarplexus)
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“She had loved him at first, she reckoned, but he had tormented her so long with his elusiveness that she did not know, honestly, now whether she even liked him. If she had been sure of him, she might have found out. But things had never stood still long enough for to decide. It sometimes struck her that Harald would not let her be sure of him for fear of losing his attraction: it was a...
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“The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.”
-John le Carre
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“Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change?”
―Frank O’Hara
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“I discovered that I am tired of being a person. Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all.”
-Susan Sontag
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You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day. From day to day, you are a nice person. From day to day, all the people who are supposed to love you on the whole do. From day to day, as you walk down a busy street in the large and modern and prosperous city in which you work and lie, dismayed and puzzled at how alone you can...
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“Beware how you take away hope from another human being.”
-Oliver Wendell Holmes
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“There was nothing for me to do but notice him as hard as I could, to notice him, to notice him, to notice him until I did not know what it was to even try to look at somebody without collapsing with exhaustion.”
-Ben Marcus
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“He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn’t really mind—or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn’t sure what this might mean—except perhaps that he had got life...
http://lateralsymmetry.tumblr.com →
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“No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.”
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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“What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken?”
-Tennessee Williams
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“I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.”
-John Knowles
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“I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you...”
– -Ernest Hemingway (via butterflyflutterbygoodbye)
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“There are silences harder to take back than words.”
– James Richardson (via chantellowitz182)
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“I was aware that I was acting atrociously but I couldn’t stop myself. Rarely had I behaved in such a manner. But I guess when we’re feeling lonely in life, we attack those who actually do love us. It’s one of the things that characterizes human nature and can be summed up in one word: FLAWED.”
-Jonathan Ames
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“We often choose a friend as we do a mistress, for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.”
-William Hazlitt
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“I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it.”
-John Steinbeck
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“But time…how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”
-Julian Barnes
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“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ”
-Joan Didion
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“Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.”
-Tana French
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“When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and...
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“Maybe our favorite quotations say more about us than about the stories and...”
– John Green (via thecyberqueen)
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“It’s a beautiful religion and I wish I understood it more. No, I don’t want to understand it all. It’s beautiful because it’s always a mystery. Sometimes I say I don’t believe in God and Jesus and Mary. I’m a bad Catholic because I miss Mass once in a while and I grumble when, at confession, I get a heavy penance for something I couldn’t help...
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“You see, there are some people that one loves, and others that perhaps one would rather be with.”
―Henrik Ibsen
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“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
-Audre Lorde