Literary enlightenment

"And then the gradual and dual blue. As night unites the viewer and the view."

[a-pale-fire]

I should so like to let myself go, to forget, to sleep. But I can’t, I’m suffocating: existence is penetrating me all over, through the eyes, through the nose, through the mouth....

And suddenly, all at once, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.

Jean-Paul Satre, Nausea.

[a-pale-fire]

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.

John Williams, Stoner

[a-pale-fire]

This infinitesimal fragment of comfortable living - he knew it was merely a loan, which he would soon have to return, but he savoured it without any sense of bitterness: the world provides the unlucky wash-out with many trivial little satisfactions, and indeed it is for them that the world reserves its passing favours, on condition that they enjoy them without discretion.

Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason

[a-pale-fire]

“This horror will grow mild, this darkness light.”

— John Milton, Paradise Lost

[a-pale-fire]

What can't be cured must be endured.

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

[a-pale-fire]

I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught   in some moorings. I am always tying up   and then deciding to depart. In storms and   at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide   around my fathomless arms, I am unable   to understand the forms of my vanity   or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder   in my hand and the sun sinking. To   you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage   of my will. The terrible channels where   the wind drives me against the brown lips   of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet   I trust the sanity of my vessel; and   if it sinks, it may well be in answer   to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

Frank O’Hara

[a-pale-fire]

I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena (via a-pale-fire)

[a-pale-fire]

Movember Support

Hi all, I know I’ve never posted anything personal before...but I’m participating in Movember to raise money for prostate cancer, testicular cancer and programs regarding mental health. If you’re kind enough to support, please do so through the link below. Take care and much love.

https://mobro.co/13791778

[a-pale-fire]

A man may live like a fool for a year, and become wise in a day.

John Williams, Augustus

[a-pale-fire]

It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection.

Anonymous, The Bhagavad Gita

[a-pale-fire]

variety is the spice of life, a truth which, of course, every happy marriage seems to contradict.

Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest

[a-pale-fire]

She had observed that the more education they got, the less they could do. Their father had gone to a one-room schoolhouse through the eighth grade and he could do anything.

Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge: Stories

[a-pale-fire]

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

[a-pale-fire]

While they talked they remembered the years of their youth, and each thought of the other as he had been at another time.

John Williams, Stoner

[a-pale-fire]

I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[a-pale-fire]

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

[a-pale-fire]

He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections