"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
- George Orwell, 1984
“Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
"But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions."
- D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."
- Jean Paul Sartre
“God made man because He loves stories.”
—Elie Wiesel, from The Gates of the Forest (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966)
"And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long."
- Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via larmoyante)
As yet untitled new painting
100 x 100cm, oil on canvas
“to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.”
- Ellen Bass
“And that’s the thing about people who mean everything they say.
They think everyone else does too.”
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
I read my books with diligence, and mounting skills and gathering certainty.
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.
—Mary Oliver, from “Staying Alive,” in Blue Pastures (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1995)
(via apoetreflects)
