"These moments were wondrous and divine, instances when the gossamer curtain between heaven and earth ripped and all of humanity witnessed the marvel of the ethereal beings."
Danielle Trussoni, Angelology (via libraryland)
"I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture."
Tom Stoppard (via wordpainting)
"When Scythrop grew up, he was sent, as usual, to a public school, where a little learning was painfully beaten into him, and from thence to university, where it was carefully taken out of him."
From Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (via thecracksareshowing)
"I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn’t care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I’d have more chance of doing everything right."
Read: Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go (via lemonxiv)
"And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled."
Ralph Ellison from Invisible Man (via lovendchocolate)
Bad translator will butcher your language. →
I know this isn’t a new concept at all, but that doesn’t mean it stopped me from fiddling around with this for a while. My favorite so far: I gave it the first stanza of this iconic Emily Dickinson poem:
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
And, 56 translations later, I got this gem:
I hope to avoid the ball. However, discrimination.
This is why I’m often skeptical of translated works.
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
photographer thomas allen constructs dioramas using figures cut from the covers of old pulp paperbacks.
"This hobble of being alive is rather serious, don’t you think so?"
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (via libraryland)
"My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for."
Neil Gaiman (via archangelsarefierce)
(Source: jaynestown, via nerd-gasms)
"You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right (…); whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it (…). And don’t write letters during that time. If you don’t write, don’t do anything else."
Flannery O’Connor (via writingadvice)
(via awritersruminations)
