“An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences.”
—Rafael Sabatini, Captain Blood (via libraryland)
September 2010
“I need to feel strongly, to love and admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe.”
—Jean-Dominique Bauby, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (via distantheartbeats)
“When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.”
—Anton Chekov, Fatherless (via libraryland)
“I had tons of things to take care of, including spending a lot of my free time devouring books in the school library.”
—Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore (via duckstreet)
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
—Mark Twain (via libraryland)
“I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong. To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. Facing the blind death stone alone, with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.”
—Christopher McCandless, Into The Wild (via movieoftheday)
“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.”
—Madame Curie (via libraryland)
“He is not heroic, he is aware that modern life is full of nondescript melancholy, of discomfort, of queer relationships which beget emotions that are half-ludicrous and yet painful and that an inconclusive ending for all these impulses is much more usual than anything extreme.”
—Virgina Woolf, on the short stories of Anton Chekhov
(via epsteinian)
(via epsteinian)
“I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called my attention to.”
—Helene Hanff, from 84, Charing Cross Road (via lotusohm)
Play
“After lunch today we had a sudden tremendous thunder storm, the drops of rain were as big as marguerite daisies - the whole sky was violet. I went out the very moment it was over - the sky was all glittering with broken light - the sun a huge splash of silver. The drops were like silverfishes hanging from the trees. I drank the rain from the peach leaves & then pulled a shower bath over my head. Every violet leaf was full. I thought of you - these are the things I want you to have. Already one is conscious of the whole sky again & the light on the water. Already one listens for the grasshoppers’ fiddle, one looks for the tiny frogs on the path - one watches the lizards … I feel so strangely as though I were the one who is home & you are away. I long for you here.”
—Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to John Middleton Murry (1920)
