Leila > Recent Status Updates

This is a good one for the “bring back yearning” crowd

“‘I want you to take my husband with you. He has been so attentive lately that he has become a perfect nuisance. Now this woman is just the thing for him. He’ll dance attendance upon her as long as she lets him and won’t bother me. I assure you, women of that kind are most useful. They form the basis of other peoples’ marriages’”

Wait no not a mistress I think

What do you mean Oscar Wilde has a play I’ve never heard of where a man begs his wife to invite his mistress to her birthday party with an appeal to female empowerment and lamentation on the undue burden of perceived purity on women in polite society?

“‘Dear Margaret, you are not going to cry.’
‘You needn’t be afraid Duchess. I never cry.’
‘That’s quite right dear. Crying is the refuge of plain women, but the ruin of pretty ones’”

“‘Because I think life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it’”

“‘Do you know, I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world. Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. It is absurd to divide people into good and bad - people are either charming or tedious. I take the side of the charming, and you, Lady Windermere, can’t help belonging to them’”

“‘You look on me as being behind the age. Well I am! I should be sorry to be on the same level as an age like this’
‘You think the age very bad?’
‘Yes. Nowadays, people seem to look on life as a speculation. It is not a speculation, it is a sacrament. Its ideal is love, its purification is sacrifice’”

“‘Don’t you want the world to take you seriously then Lord Darlington?’
‘No, not the world. Who are the people the world takes seriously? All the dull people one can think of, from the bishops down to the boars’l

“‘Besides, there is this to be said. If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism’”

"Now the last remnants [of childhood] fall away from me like flakes of sun-scorched skin, and beneath looms an awkward, an impossible adult. I read in my poetry album while the night wanders past the window - and, unawares, my childhood falls silently to the bottom of my memory, that library of the soul from which I will draw knowledge and experience for the rest of my life." stunning.

"I smile in agreement as if I'm also looking forward to such a future, and us usual, I'm afraid of being found out. I feel like I'm a foreigner in this world and I can't talk to anyone about the overwhelming problems that fill me at the thought of the future."

"Istedgade is my childhood street - it's rhythm will always pound in my blood and its voice will always reach me and be the same as in those distant times when we swore to be true to each other." GORGEOUS

"Childhood is dark and it's always moaning like a little animal that's locked in a cellar and forgotten. It comes out of your throat like your breath in the cold, and sometimes it's too little, other times too big. It never fits exactly. It's only when it has been cast off that you can look at it calmly and talk about it like an illness you've survived."

"in the world, the result of enlivening unity by a peace keeping group would be real peace on earth."

"if the square root of 1% of the world's population -- or 8,000 people -- practices advanced meditation techniques in a group, then that group, according to published research, is quadratically more powerful than the same number scattered about" yeah obsessed w him what the hell r we talking about rn

well yes of course the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace

this chapter is called "The Box and the Key".

the only words within the chapter? "I don't have a clue what those are."

“You can show it, show the human condition, show conflicts and contrasts, but you don’t have to go through that yourself. You are the orchestrator of it, but you are not in it. Let your characters do the suffering. It’s common sense. The more the artist is suffering, the less creative he’s going to be.“
Interesting to hear this pov from a man who made such intense, often dark work

“It should be fun. In work and in life, we’re all supposed to get along. We’re supposed to have so much fun, like puppy dogs with our tails wagging. It’s supposed to be great living. It’s supposed to be fantastic.” Once more, what an open hearted and joyful man

“I love dream logic. I just like the way dreams go, but I have hardly ever gotten ideas from dreams. I get more ideas from music or just walking around.” Interesting

“I saw this light, and it thrilled my soul. I feel lucky to live with that light. I love Los Angeles.” What an open hearted, joyful man

“The Art Life” idea as a contemporary and less explicit iteration of Virginia Woolfe’s thesis in A Room of One’s Own

Well and yes of course he practiced transcendental mediation and wrote a book about it. What a unique man

"Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can't get out of it on your own."

"I look up at her and understand many things at once. She is smaller than other women, younger than other mothers, and there's a world outside my street that she fears. And whenever we both fear it together, she will stab me in the back"

whole page gorg

"And at once my father puts the book down on his stomach and looks at me as if he'd like to say something to me. But what my father and I want to say to each other will never be said"