April 2011
“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
—L. P. Jacks (via yesiac)
“There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.”
—Anaïs Nin(via psychotherapy)
1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.
2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time.
3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read.
4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Readers May Be Divided into Four Classes
I am a wolf in human skin
I dance, I scratch, I howl within
And into the wild I go, and into the wild I go
“A steady, wind-driven rain composes music for the psyche. It not only nurtures and renews, it consecrates and sanctifies. It whispers in secret languages about the primordial essence of things.”
—Tom Robbins (via lastwaltzinvienna)
Abandonment:
Vulnerability at its highest degree.
You’re leaving me
I can see it in your eyes.
Just turn around,
Take a deep breath,
And let the darkness strangle you,
Asphyxiating you,
Back
To where you belong.
“I am very good at sitting still doing nothing. I can sit and not move for two to three hours and not get bored.”
—Daul Kim (via sacraments)
“There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.”
—David Eagleman, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. (via germancitygirl)
“
It took the sea a thousand years,
A thousand years to trace
The granite features of this cliff,
In crag and scarp and base.
It took the sea an hour one night,
An hour of storm to place
The sculpture of these granite seams
Upon a woman’s face.
17 is an unlucky number in Italy, because in Roman digits 17 is written XVII, that could be rearranged to “VIXI”, which in Latin means “I have lived” but can be a euphemism for “I am dead.”
“I don’t suppose I really know you very well - but I know you smell like the delicious damp grass that grows near old walls and that your hands are beautiful opening out of your sleeves and that the back of your head is a mossy sheltered cave when there is trouble in the wind and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, November 1931. (via nosferattus)
“It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That’s how we got “Backstreet.” We put “Boys” on it, because no matter how old we get, we’ll always be boys.”
—Kevin Richardson (via grace-notes)
