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#1

“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
― Anais Nin

tags: anais-nin, inspirational, living, mermaids, no-fear, sea

3031 likes

#2

“Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade. ”
― Marcel Proust

469 likes

#3

“Like dreams, his texts combine precise "realistic" detail with absurdity, careful observation and reasoning on the part of the protagonists with inexplicable obliviousness and carelessness.”
― Hartmut M. Rastalsky

tags: franz-kafka, kafka, subconsciousm, surrealism

1 likes

#4

“When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

tags: loneliness

3289 likes

#5

“I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood -- it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation -- which these books arouse in a genuine collector.”
― Walter Benjamin

tags: illuminations

23 likes

#6

“History is written by the victors.”
― Walter Benjamin

tags: history

503 likes

#7

“Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
― Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason

tags: awe, inspirational, morality, stars

382 likes

#8

“Age should not have its face lifted, but it should rather teach the world to admire wrinkles as the etchings of experience and the firm line of character.”
― Clarence Day

tags: age, experience, face, wrinkles

23 likes

#9

“Most people do not have a problem with being old. They have a problem with looking old.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

tags: aged, appearance, feeble, feebleness, looks, old, old-age, senile, senility, white-hair, wrinkles

5 likes

#10

“Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.”
― Walter Moers, The City of Dreaming Books

tags: fiction, on-fiction, reading

318 likes

#11

“The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

tags: humor

1410 likes

#12

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
― Anthony G. Oettinger

tags: humor, misattributed-to-groucho-marx, time

6197 likes

#13

“Direct your eye inward, and you'll find / A thousand regions in your mind / Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be / Expert in home-cosmography”
― Henry David Thoreau

48 likes

#14

“Who are you?" she inquired, as the cat passed by.
I'm the cat that looked at a king," he replied.
And I," she remarked with a toss of her head, "am the cow that jumped over the moon."
Is that so?" said the cat. "Whatever for?"
The cow stared. She had never been asked that question before. And suddenly it occured to her that there might something else to do than jumping over moons.”
― P.L. Travers

57 likes

#15

“You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.”
― Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto

114 likes

#16

“The death cry of that hen imprinted itself on the boy’s memory so hauntingly that in 1958 he wrote an impassioned attack on the guillotine. As a result, in part, of that polemic, capital punishment was abolished in France. Who is to say, then, that the hen did not speak?”
― J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello

1 likes

#17

“I get a warm feeling among my books.”
― Anthony Powell

2763 likes

#18

“Books do furnish a room.”
― Anthony Powell, Dance to the Music of Time

tags: books, furnishing, furniture

107 likes

#19

“Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.”
― Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away

tags: empathy, humanity, love

102 likes

#20

“but the music, which he hoped would coat his nerve ends, only splayed them.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

0 likes

#21

“She had been husbanding her own misery, shaping it, making of it an art and a Way.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

0 likes

#22

“What are you? Some kinda mermaid?” one man had shouted, and reached hurriedly for his socks.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

0 likes

#23

“From the beginning, his mother and Pilate had fought for his life, and he had never so much as made either of them a cup of tea.”
― Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon

10 likes

#24

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
― George Orwell

81 likes

#25

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

tags: consistency, greatness, misunderstood

905 likes

#26

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

tags: read, readers, reading, reading-books

35636 likes

#27

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

tags: character, empowerment, flaws, freedom, gender, identity, image, independence, integrity, realism, self-awareness, self-determination, women

13880 likes

#28

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

tags: accomplishment, attributed-no-source, be-yourself, conformity, individuality

69684 likes

#29

“Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.”
― Herman Hesse

tags: steppenwolf

4617 likes

#30

“The way of Friends is to think quietly and to listen. We ask the question, we consider how the answer is made by different people, we ask again, answer again, change our minds; we reach an understanding. The Meeting evolves this way, not by shouting each other down, not by the weight of the majority, but by the capacity of individual human beings to comprehend one another.”
― Molly Gloss, The Dazzle of Day

4 likes

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