"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken."
— Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
"Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance."
— Hocus Pocus (Kurt Vonnegut)
(Source: harmfulwords)
"[I]rony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I’m saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean."
— David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction
"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
—
Jonathan Safran Foer (via kari-shma)
Sometimes these quotes come at just the right time.
(via leeshiebean)(Source: kari-shma, via squeetothegee-deactivated201111)
"The old tyrants had enough insolence to despoil the poor, but they had not enough insolence to preach to them. It was the gentleman who oppressed the slums; but it was the slums that admonished the gentleman. And just as we are undemocratic in faith and morals, so we are, by the very nature of our attitude in such matters, undemocratic in the tone of our practical politics. It is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us."
— G.K. Chesterton (via azspot)
(via azspot)
