“Your handwriting. The way you walk. Which china pattern you choose. It’s all giving you away. Everything you do shows your hand. Everything is a self portrait. Everything is a diary.”

- Chuck Palahniuk (via csdollface)

(via finding-syzygy)

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

- Carl Sagan (via nouvelliste)

awritersruminations:

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered.
—W.G. Sebald

awritersruminations:

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered.

W.G. Sebald

(via leopoldgursky)

thedailywhat:

Animated Short of the Day: “Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor.”

Co-directed by William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg, Morris Lessmore is one of five films nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Short Film category.

[notcot.]

(via finding-syzygy)

sharingpoetry:

Want is ten thousand blue feathers falling
all around me, and me unable to stomach
that I might catch five but never ten thousand.
So I drop my hands to my sides and wait
to be buried. I open a book and the words
spring and taunt. Flashes—motel, lapidary,
piranha—of every story, every…

(Source: ahuntersheart)

dream

You can walk upon the skies
You can swim beneath the seas
You can dream anything you want
You can do anything you dream

“It must be somewhere, the original harmony,
somewhere in great nature, hidden.
Is it in the furious infinite,
in distant stars’ orbits,
is it in the sun’s scorn,
in a tiny flower, in treegossip,
in heartmusic’s mothersong
or in tears?
It must be somewhere, immortality,
somewhere the original harmony must be found:
how else could it infuse
the human soul,
that music?”

Juhan Liiv, Music
(via melancholynotes)

(via growing-orbits)

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust in them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.”

- C. S. Lewis, The Weight Of Glory.  (via theonlyadventureleft)

(Source: whiskeyriver.blogspot.com, via theonlyadventureleft-deactivate)

a bit of chaos on cognitive chaos

It has been one of those days when just a single part of the world that I hadn’t known before unfolded before me, reminding me just how little of the world I’ve seen. Now that I’m home from school I think I’ve been on a bit of sensory overload—maybe that’s why all my thoughts have been coming in fragments, nothing whole or developed. I am flooded with vibrant verbs or succinct subjects but never simultaneously. I think I am overwhelmed by the weight of the world, of humanity. Possibility. Failed possibility. At school there’s direction, purpose. The same with work, or in the car, or in the shower. In those places I am concentrated on some specific sort of goal, which seems to focus my mind enough to let it explore a manageable realm of topics. Beautiful thoughts emerge from the mundane hours of routine, it seems. In the rest of the world I am drowning. There is too much stimulus, too many options. I feel the need to create but have too many ways to do so and so sit quietly within my din-filled mind. It’s chaos in there. It’s history and projection, art and filth, reminiscence and disgust. It’s as if the world has become so sharp that I can’t see it anymore (like those new TVs—they are so clear as to look fake, because things don’t even look that real in real life). Everyone, everything has finally risen to just in front of my eyes and it’s perfect reflection has blinded me. 

“If you work with your hands, you’re a laborer.
If you work with your hands and your mind, you’re a craftsman.
If you work with your hands and your mind and your heart, you’re an artist.”

- Saint Francis of Assisi (via ftweeks)

(Source: , via subcreation-deactivated20120425)

  archive