July 2011
Words are worthless. Words are all we’ll ever have.
“As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.”
—Sylvia Plath (via light-essence)
“Life is not an easy matter… You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”
—Leon Trotsky (via lastwaltzinvienna)
“Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.”
—T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
“Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something - perhaps not much, just something - of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river. Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment, of time, and in that same moment, make out of it all the vital signature of a human being - not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses - but a human being, we call it poetry.”
—Ted Hughes (via clavicola)
“It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves’ feet guide the world.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra (Part II, Chapter 44, The Stillest Hour)
“There is so much romanticism surrounding fragility, of which, is a common misconception. It’s a difficult business, being fragile, to be vulnerable, always; to put up a front that allows people to perceive you as something odd, eccentric and so strong and resilient - of being complex when simplicity is all you are. I am shattered glass or ash bones; the walls were nothing but chiffon and aging cellophane - you can read me like a book and tear my pages. I would let you break me so easily and collapse inwards.”
—trauermarsch (via waur)
“Akhmatova often sat smoking a cigarette at a side table, dressed in a tight skirt, with a scarf round her shoulders and a necklace of black agate. She was always surrounded by a group of admirers. Alexander Blok, the great poet of the preceding generation, found Akhmatova’s beauty strangely terrifying. Mandelstam described her as ‘a black angel’ with the mark of God upon her.”
—Elaine Feinstein, Anna of All the Russias: A Life of Anna Akhmatova (via lastwaltzinvienna)
