bear witness

"For the dead and the living, we must bear witness."
-Elie Wiesel
-Photo: "The Victims of Auschwitz," Katharine Urbaniak (via)

how forgiveness budded

"I wondered if that's how forgiveness budded; not with fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night."

-Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner
-Image: light house keeper in the desert sun

Neruda

"I want to fill my mouth with your name."

-Pablo Neruda

(x)

slaughterhouse five

"But she did look back, and I loved her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt. So it goes. People aren't supposed to look back. I'm certainly not going to do it anymore."

-Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
-Photo: Stephen Shames (via)

murakami

"What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back."

-Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
-Photo: Albert Levy (via)

jean-paul

a clockwork orange

' He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice.'
'These are subtleties...'

-Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
-Photo: "In Tune" Catherine Hennessey

a small but noteworthy note

I have seen so many young men 

over the years who think they'rerunning 

at other young men. 

They are not. 

They're running at me.

-Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
-Image: 1914-1945

beginning over again

"And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had the familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
-gif via dishonestyouth.

unbearable lightness

"When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object."

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
-Photos: insertsomethingpoignant.

twilight of the idols

"Without music, life would be a mistake."

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
-Photo via insertsomethingpoignant.

conversation among the ruins

Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock;
While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I sit
Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot.
Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic:
With such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate.
What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?

-Sylvia Plath, "A Conversation Among the Ruins," 1956.
-Photo: Harper Smith for Fashion Gone Rogue.

a human urge for dirt

Earthbound.

It's trying to get up

that gets us down. 

-Heid E. Erdrich, "Earhbound," National Monuments (88-89).
 Photo: "Sun Over Earth (NASA, International Space Station, 07/21/03)," by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

catherine and david (and marita too)

"He would try to work today and would almost certainly fail. There had been too much emotion, too much damage, too much of everything and his changing of allegiance, no matter how sound it had seemed, no matter how it simplified things for him, was a grave and violent thing and this letter compounded the gravity and the violence."

-Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden.
Photos: tumblr, weheartit.

royal stacks

Royal Library, Old University, Coimbra, Portugal.

heaven

Cambridge. King’s College Library (Interior) by Cornell University Libraryon Flickr.

the garden of eden

"They could not be held tighter together than they were now and there was no badness afterwards. There was only happiness and loving each other and then hunger and replenishing and starting over."

-Ernest Hemingway, The Garden of Eden.
Photos: Unknown; Michael Donovan.

no boundaries, only transitions

"He was not crazy; he'd never been crazy. He'd only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time."

-Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Photos: © Katya Bryskina [Source]

bukowski

"I need help
I am a thin man being eaten by
green trees
butterflies
and you."

-Charles Bukowski, "I am eaten by butterflies," The Roominghouse Madrigals
Photo: Hana Haley [Source]

spectral shades

"Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say of a spectral shade."

-Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera
Painting: The Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich. [Source]

Revolutionary Letter #4

Left to themselves people
grow their hair
Left to themselves they make love
sleep easily
share blankets, dope & children
they are no lazy or afraid
they plant seeds, they smile, they speak to one another. The word
coming into its own: touch of love
on the brain, the ear.

We return with the sea, the tides
we return as often as leaves, as numerous
as grass, gentle, insistent, we remember
the way,
out babies toddle barefoot thru the cities of the universe.

-Diane DiPrima, "Revolutionary Letter #4," The Sixties Papers


[Photo Source]