"He felt his breathing die away and he became part of the silence."
— Katherine Mansfield, The Escape
"Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
(Source: mustachemanblues, via wendesgray)
"Write me long letters. In the country — they unfurl like flowers in water. You do it by being so uninhabited: so magnificently unself-conscious."
— Virginia Woolf, “Selected Letters”
(Source: violentwavesofemotion, via lifeinpoetry)
“Don’t trust people who tell you that they love you. All the time. As though the statement itself is some kind of confirmation — a little gold star. And then at the end of the week they tally up their starcharts and it’s a kind of game. You used to do this when you were a kid. Remember? Say just one word over and over as fast as you can. Soon you’ll find that the word undresses like you are pulling a loose string on a sweater. It starts to lose all of its meaning because you are just making noise. Sound itself has been pulled through a meat grinder and it has become a ramble. That’s the same with these plastic gestures of great love. The boy who stammered awkwardly and didn’t know what words to say — yes, that’s who you should have listened to. The boy who sounds good on paper but doesn’t say half a word in reality. That girl who stares at her shoes or looks up at the sky isn’t crazy. They are quiet because speaking is difficult. All the words, every breath is surrendered to looking at you. Because love itself is wordless. Love is a verb.”
— by pavorst
(via fragilis)
"No one is dead.
We walk on air, Watson.
There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorus.
— Sylvia Plath, from Ariel: The Detective
(Source: violentwavesofemotion, via theotherway)
"We read to extend our sympathies, to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves, to educate our imaginations, to find liberation from the prison of the self, to be made whole where we are broken, to be reconciled to the absurdity of existence, in short to be redeemed from flesh, the ego and despair."
— Howard Jacobsen, “In Praise of Bad Boys’ Books”
(Source: Guardian, via inmilkwood)
"The sweet small clumsy feet of April came
into the ragged meadow of my soul."
into the ragged meadow of my soul."
— E.E Cummings, from If I Have Made My Lady Intricate
(Source: violentwavesofemotion, via c-ovet)
"I desire to press in my arms the loveliness which has not yet come into the world."
— James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (via word-digest)
(via lifeinpoetry)
"The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me."
— Oscar Wilde
(Source: moving-words, via songsforchildren)
"All the while she was dying, I could not stop painting her face."
— Claude Monet
(Source: violentwavesofemotion, via c-ovet)
