ʀєиé (๑❛ᴗ❛๑)۶

“I loved to take her hair down and she sat on the bed and kept very still, except suddenly she would dip down to kiss me while I was doing it. She had a lovely face and body and lovely smooth skin too. We would be lying together and I would touch her cheeks and her forehead and under her eyes and her chin and throat with the tips of my fingers and say, ‘Smooth as piano keys,’ and she would stroke my chin with her finger and say, ‘Smooth as emery paper and very hard on piano keys.’ ‘Is it rough?’ ‘No, darling. I was just making fun of you.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

“The Hebrew word, the word timshel - 'Thou mayest' - that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open...Why, that makes a man great...He can choose his course and fight it through and win...I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest'. ch 24”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and futility that presents as a fear of death. It’s maybe close to what people call dread or angst. But it’s not these things, quite. It’s more like wanting to die in order to escape the unbearable feeling of becoming aware that I’m small and weak and selfish and going without any doubt at all to die. It’s wanting to jump overboard.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“It is strange how in some things honest people can be dishonest without the slightest compunction.”
― James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man