"It is late at night. I have already crossed the threshold of fatigue and am in the grip of something resembling inspiration."
Viktor Shklovsky, Third Factory
"Do not whine… Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone."
Joan Didion (Blue Nights)
"She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris."
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
"In it, Tolstoy related a Russian fable about a man who, being chased by a monster, jumps into a well. As the man is falling down the well, however, he sees there’s a dragon at the bottom, waiting to eat him. Right then, the man notices a branch sticking out of the wall, and he grabs on to it, and hangs. This keeps the man from falling into the dragon’s jaws, or being eaten by the monster above, but it turns out there’s another problem. Two mice, one black and one white, are scurrying around and around the branch, nibbling it. It’s only a matter of time before they will chew through the branch, causing the man to fall. As the man contemplates his inescapable fate, he notices something else: from the end of the branch he’s holding, a few drops of honey are dripping. The man sticks out his tongue to lick them. This, Tolstoy says, is our human predicament: we’re the man clutching the branch. Death awaits us. There is no escape. And so we distract ourselves by licking whatever drops of honey come within our reach. Most of what Mitchell read in college hadn’t conveyed Wisdom with a capital W. But this Russian fable did. It was true about people in general and it was true about Mitchell in particular. What were he and his friends doing, really, other than hanging from a branch, sticking their tongues out to catch the sweetness? He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies…their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line…And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism. Mitchell had always prided himself on his discipline. He studied harder than anyone he knew. But that was just his way of tightening his grip on the branch."
The Marriage Plot (Eugenides)
"I hadn’t realized how much I’d been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to."
Talk Before Sleep, Elizabeth Berg
"Oblivious to the social system, he lived for a while alone and unsought in a high room in Beck Hall—a slim dark boy of medium height with a shy sensitive mouth. His allowance was more than liberal. He laid the foundations for a library by purchasing from a wandering bibliophile first editions of Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy, and a yellowed illegible autograph letter of Keats’s, finding later that he had been amazingly overcharged. He became an exquisite dandy, amassed a rather pathetic collection of silk pajamas, brocaded dressing-gowns, and neckties too flamboyant to wear; in this secret finery he would parade before a mirror in his room or lie stretched in satin along his window-seat looking down on the yard and realizing dimly this clamor, breathless and immediate, in which it seemed he was never to have a part."
The Beautiful and the Damned (Fitzgerald)
"A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination."
Nelson Mandela
"The first step toward knowledge is to know that we are not ignorant."
Richard Cecil
"The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."
Eden Phillpotts
"We read to know that we are not alone."
C.S. Lewis
"Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love."
Rumi
"I always wished I could be a Russian Doll. A red one. With a big pair of bright blue eyes and painted on eyelashes and pink rosy cheeks. Really rosy. And my mouth would be painted on red like a bow. I’d have a flower on my chest - a rose - and two small little hands by my side. And then I could be unwrapped, two, three, four times until I was small. Really small."
Cassie Ainsworth
"When someone is crying, of course, the noble thing to do is to comfort them. But if someone is trying to hide their tears, it may also be noble to pretend you do not notice them."
Lemony Snicket
"You are beautiful,” he said suddenly.
“How do you know?”
“Because for women moonlight is the hardest light of all.”
“Am I nice in the moonlight?”
“You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Short Stories
maryloupaquinworld asked: Hey there - cool blog you got going! Hope you don't mind if I use some of your content later down the road, great stuff. New follower, can you please follow me back?
Well hello! Please feel free to use as much as you please, and welcome to tumblr. I very much appreciate the compliment! I will gladly follow.
