June 2013
17 posts
“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are things you get ashamed of, because words make them smaller. When they were in your head they were limitless; but when they come out they seem to be no bigger than normal things. But that’s not all. The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried; they are clues that could guide your enemies to a prize they would love to steal. It’s hard and painful for you to talk about these things … and then people just look at you strangely. They haven’t understood what you’ve said at all, or why you almost cried while you were saying it.”
—Stephen King, The Body (via larmoyante)
“The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring.”
—
-James Joyce, Ulysses
Happy Bloomsday!
(via themissourireview)
“Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.”
—Oscar Wilde (via oh-girl-among-the-roses)
“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (via likeafieldmouse)
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
—
— Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices (via volumexii)
(I intensely disliked my repeated line line drawings when they first began as a way to ritualize my practice and distill my drawings down. Now the aesthetic I despised has grown on me)
“
Talking to Grief
Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.
I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.
You think I don’t know you’ve been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.
“I exist for myself, and for those to whom my unquenchable thirst for freedom gives everything, but also for everyone, since insofar as I am able to love - I love everyone. Of noble hearts, I am the noblest - and the most generous of those that yearn to give love in return. - I am a human being, I love death and I love life.”
—“Self-portrait” - Egon Schiele (via rockyrelay)
“Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose days more and more repeat themselves down to the smallest detail, resembles that punishment in which each pupil must according to his offense write down the same meaningless (in repetition, at least) sentence ten times, a hundred times or even oftener; except that in my case the punishment is given me with only this limitation: “as many times as you can stand it.”
—Franz Kafka, (via substantia-nigra)
May 2013
15 posts
“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
—Robert Henri (via 7knotwind)
“Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed.”
—Thich Nhat Hanh (via fuck-yeah-existentialism)
April 2013
23 posts
“What I value the most is the perishable. I love the way it exhausts and refills me. Yes; I love only what vanishes: shaky words, trembling answers, not knowing how to say goodbye, not knowing how to stay inside my head […]”
—Katherine Mansfield, from a journal entry dated 10 January 1910 (via violentwavesofemotion)
“But remembering those moments, I still stand in ecstasy, inhaling through the noise of falling rain, the smell of invisible, enduring lilacs”
—Marcel Proust (via ladymycroft)
“The most incredible thing is that so much happens outside of the will. You can’t will anything. Not even solitude is an act of will. You simply endure it. You must hold on until the very end, without weakening. You can do nothing else. But you must not believe that because you accept being nothing, you are anyone special.”
—Bram van Velde (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
“Maps are the places where memories go not to die but to live forever.”
—Adam Gopnik on maps (via explore-blog)
“A loner. A lot of people can’t be on their own. They get frightened, but isolation doesn’t bother me at all. It gives me a sense of security”
—Jimmy Page (via jimmypageisalltherage)