Bindu Reddy > Recent Status Updates

14. “They feel space trying to rid them of the notion of days. It says: what’s a day? They insist it’s twenty-four hours and ground crews keep telling them so, but it takes their twenty-four hours and throws sixteen days and nights at them in return.”

Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.

What a unique book. A quote-
"It's August, the afternoon of the year."

Loving the audiobook experience.

When we take the self out of the picture, it seems, things go along with little effort.

The key to finding a happy balance in modern lives is simplicity

‘At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you.’

Anguish and exhilaration laid beautiful and bare.

Bengali immigrants in America

“It should surprise no one that the life of the writer- such as it is- is colourless to the point of sensory deprivation.

“You can read in the space of a coffin, and you can write in the space of a tool shed meant for mowers and spades.”

“One holds every phrase, every scene to the light as one reads-for nature seems very oddly to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity of disintegrity.”

She opens every entry with details of her beloved garden, ruminates extensively on what it means to live alone doing what she loves, quotes beautiful passages which keep her going, resents answering the mountain of mail she receives and loves the little wild cat that she feeds and longs to befriend.

May Sarton is more a friend than my real friends rn while wading through solitude. Love her.

“A sturdy plant is a great comfort.”

In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitive ness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen.

“You teach best what you most need to learn.”

Impressionist paintings are the political and social developments of late nineteenth century France.

If one had time to write the whole of one’s life thus bit by bit as a novel how rewarding this would be. The pleasant parts would be doubly pleasant, the funny parts funnier, and sin and grief would be softened by a light of philosophic consolation.

Fresh apricots are best of course, but the dried kind, soaked for twenty-four hours and then well drained, make a heavenly accompaniment for any sort of mildly sweet biscuit or cake. They are especially good with anything made of almonds, and thus consort happily with red wine. I am not a great friend of your peach, but I suspect the apricot is the king of fruit.

Where did Atman reside, where did his eternal heart beat, where else but in one's own self, in its innermost part, in its indestructible part, which everyone had in himself? But where, where was this self? It was not flesh and bone, it was neither thought not consciousness,..

It's strange, the gulls who scorn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly.

When the world was in turmoil and devastation appeared inevitable, art was not an indulgence but a refuge, the fragments remained after a cycle had run its course from creation through to destruction and begun again.

'Men say that time passes; time says that men pass!'
-Raphael Hurst
Raphael Hurst

When there's no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool.

But what has he got against the gun? How odd to expect variety from a a gun! Why can't he get it into his head that it's for him to stop repeating himself - not for the gun - that you can never say something meaningful by accumulating absurdities in your notebook, that facts don't exist until man puts into them something of his own, a bit of free human genius - of myth.

"The spirit of the man is great, how puny are his deeds."