“But she was in a mood when it is almost physically disagreeable to interrupt the stride of one’s thought. She liked getting hold of some book, and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with anyone.”
— Virginia Woolf, Night And Day. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
7:23 pm • 7 May 2012 • 255 notes
“It seemed too strange, and wonderful, and all together incredible, that there could really be cities and towns and villages and green fields and hedges and farm-yards and orchards, away over that wide blank of sea, and away beyond the place where the sky came down to the water. And to think of steering right out among those waves, and leaving the bright land behind, and the dark night coming on, too, seemed wild and foolhardy; and I looked with a sort of fear at the sailors standing by me, who could be so thoughtless at such a time. But then I remembered, how many times my own father had said he had crossed the ocean; and I had never dreamed of such a thing as doubting him; for I always thought him a marvelous being, infinitely purer and greater than I was, who could not by any possibility do wrong, or say an untruth. Yet now, how could I credit it, that he, my own father, whom I so well remembered, had ever sailed out of these Narrows, and sailed through the sky and water line, and gone to England, and France, Liverpool, and Marseilles. It was too wonderful to believe.”
— From Redburn by Herman Melville
9:10 pm • 5 July 2011 • 7 notes
“Any writer worth his salt knows that only a small proportion of literature does more than partly compensate people for the damage they have suffered by learning to read.”
— from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
2:19 pm • 12 June 2011
“…The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If it were only possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadness with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing.”
— from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke; Letter 8. Translated by Stephen Mitchell.
10:04 am • 10 June 2011 • 4 notes
“A human being ought not to be too light, its experience should silt up inside it and give it weight and substance.”
— from Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
2:30 pm • 7 June 2011
“When Velutha arrived, [blind] Mammachi lost her bearings and spewed her blind venom, her crass, insufferable insults, at a panel in the sliding-folding door until Baby Kochamma tactfully swiveled her around and aimed her rage at the right direction, at Velutha standing very still in the gloom.”
—
from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
[The funniest moment in the book!]
12:52 pm • 7 June 2011 • 1 note
“It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you don’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”
— from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
12:46 pm • 7 June 2011 • 3 notes
“Mme. Verdurin did not give “dinners,” but she had “Wednesdays.” Her Wednesdays were a work of art. While knowing that there was nothing equal to them elsewhere, Mme. Verdurin introduced fine distinctions between them. “This last Wednesday wasn’t up to the one before,” she would say. “But I think the next’ll be one of the most successful I’ve ever given.” She sometimes went so far as to confess: “This Wednesday wasn’t worthy of the others. In return, I’ve got a big surprise for you for the one after that.” In the final weeks of the season in Paris, before leaving for the country, the Patronne would announce that the Wednesdays were ending. It was an opportunity to spur on the faithful: “There are only three Wednesdays left, there are only two more,” she would say, in the same tone of voice as if the world was about to end. “You’re not going to let me down next Wednesday for the closure.” But this closure was a sham, for she would warn them: “Now, officially, there are no more Wednesdays. That was the last for this year. But I shall be here all the same on Wednesdays. We’ll have Wednesday among ourselves. Who knows? These little intimate Wednesdays will perhaps be the pleasantest.”
—
from Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by John Sturrock
MADAME VERDURIN IS THE BEST.
11:33 am • 29 May 2011
“But I have not forgotten her. It often happens that when I am thinking of her I am seized by a wild longing. But these recurrences of desire force us to reflect that, if we wanted to meet these girls again with the same pleasure, we should have also to go back to the year in question, which has since been followed by ten others, in the course of which the girl has faded. We can sometimes find a person again, but not abolish time. All this up until that unforseen day, sad as a winter’s night, when we are no longer seeking that particular girl, or any other, and when to find one would alarm us even.”
— from Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust, translated by John Sturrock
11:16 am • 29 May 2011 • 3 notes
