The price of anything is the amount of life you pay for it.
— Henry David Thoreau
Bookish, curious, critical. I also curate a manuscript blog.
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2012-05-14 7 notes
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2012-05-12 4 notes
She liked only what was most elegant, and if she couldn’t have the best she would do without the second best, because second best meant nothing to her. Yes, she was capable of doing without, her mother was right about that, and doing without had an element of the undemanding; but when, exceptionally, it came to really wanting something, that something always had to be quite out of the ordinary. And in this she was demanding.
— Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest (1894)
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2012-05-05 3 notes
Haruki Murakami and the art of the day
Kevin Harnett:
What appealed to me most about Murakami’s essay was the way it joined something very big, like writing a novel, with something very small, like what time each day to go to bed. I was twenty-seven at the time and still very much befuddled by the large-scale project of adult life. Murakami’s essay was not a panacea, but it did sketch a type of path that I thought I might be capable of following. While I may not have known exactly what I wanted from the next fifty years, with a little reflection I could parse the minor decisions in my days—what to eat, who to see, how to spend the last hour before bed. I hoped, maybe against odds, that the answers to larger questions would resolve themselves out of the gradual buildup of small but deliberate choices.
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2012-05-04 2,923 notes
pronunciation | \a-doks-‘o-graf-E\
submitted by | Azalea Mastio
submit words | here(via an-itinerant-poet)
Source: other-wordly
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2012-04-29 12,173 notes
Entire novel written on the walls of abandoned home
(via leopoldgursky)
Source: wasbella102
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2012-04-04 0 notes
Rostov vs. Bolkonskaya
“But why, Count, why?” she suddenly almost cried out involuntarily, moving towards him. ‘Why, tell me? You must tell me.”
He was silent.
“I don’t know your why, Count,” she went on. “But it’s hard for me, it’s …I’ll confess it to you. You want for some reason to deprive me of your former friendship. And that pains me.”
There were tears in her eyes and in her voice. “There has been so little happiness in my life that every loss is hard for me…Forgive me, good-bye.” She suddenly began to weep and started out of the room.
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2012-03-23 56 notes
Evergreen Review celebrated the victory in the Henry Miller case on the front page.
Source: i12bent
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2012-03-22 75 notes
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.
— Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (via hateshiploveship)
Source: hateshiploveship
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2012-03-21 59 notes
Source: millionsmillions
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2012-03-06 106 notes
It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (via philphys)
Source: philphys
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2012-02-25 26 notes
The girl is self-willed and fantastic, insane, she’s wicked, wicked!
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, from The Idiot, 1869
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2012-02-23 113 notes
I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.
— Franz Kafka, The Castle (via philphys)
Source: philphys
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2012-02-18 1 note
Ocean, Ocean I’ll beat you in the end.
— Ken Kesey’s fake suicide note; he actually faked his death and fled to Mexico to avoid drug charges.
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2012-02-14 15 notes
Love is Not All
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.—Edna St. Vincent Millay
