"A quote a day keeps the depression away."

quote [kwəʊt] noun; a quotation from a text or speech.

[aquoteadaykeepsthedepressionaway]

Quotes are for dumb people who can’t think of something intelligent to say on their own.

Bo Burnham 

[aquoteadaykeepsthedepressionaway]

[funeral]

“Hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because…when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves,…we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters…But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.

Jean-Paul Sartre on the line “Hell is other people” in a talk that preceded a recording of his play “No Exit”, 1965

[aquoteadaykeepsthedepressionaway]

Orpheus, Orpheus How you could charm the sun into rising,  How your father Apollo breathed fire into your divine mortal hands and watched with pride as you learned to make it sing,  They said that with a few strums of a lyre you could create life where there was only silence,  That you could move the trees to dance, the hills to laugh, the water to hum, the air itself to sway in sublime ecstasy, I could forgive you then,  For thinking you could melt the frozen hearts of gods,  Pluck your love from the jaws of death,  And wake the dead to join you in song,  Eurydice, Eurydice  I know how you must have felt, swept up into something so glorious and beautiful,  To be entranced so completely you’re willing to ignore the warning signs, the prophesied doom and the hubris of men,  You lost yourself in those songs,  And they were all for you, every note he played bore your name and the whole world could only stand in envy  They said you were beautiful, a muse of the purest order,  And when you loved, you loved hard enough to shake the heavens and force them to pay attention,  I could forgive you, then,  For never seeing it coming,  The perfection shattered by the fangs of a snake,  Who has time, after all, to watch the ground,  When your heart has taken to the sky?  Orpheus, Orpheus,  How brave you must have felt, how romantic, strolling through the gates of the underworld with only your lyre and your heavy heart,  Confident that it was enough, that all the gods and monsters of this world could be bowed by the sheer force of your love and your melody,  And they were, Orpheus,  You drew tears from the burning gaze of Hades himself, as Persephone sighed in longing,  But you had a lesson to learn, Orpheus,  That the gods are cruel and men imperfect,  You were weak then, Orpheus, as we all must be weak,  Just steps from the light, you looked back to see your love ripped back into the world of shadows,  She had been your shadow all along, Orpheus  For all your beauty, all your power, you wavered in your faith, and doomed the both of you forever,  You, wandering the world eternal with your haunted heart and your mourning songs,  And she, trapped as a phantom too soon in the kingdom of the dead, always wondering why you couldn’t do it, why you couldn’t have just a little more faith,  Orpheus, Orpheus,  I know why you couldn’t do it,  I am just like you, Held in the grip of fear, uncertain and desperate,  We’re all born that way, I think  Nervous energy faced with insurmountable odds,  Some of us ascend, overcome it all through supreme will and conviction,  Some of us descend, meet our devils where they live and lose the games they play,  But we all falter somewhere,  Even once, even one small mistake, Sometimes that’s all it takes,  Orpheus, I can forgive you, then, There’s not a soul alive who wouldn’t have looked back

— The Descent: Orpheus and Eurydice (Tyler King)

[scriptwriters-network]

“The future is not someplace we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths to it are not to be found but made.”

— John Schaar

[therehavebeenstranger]

that lizzo quote about loving yourself as a tactic of survival

[therehavebeenstranger]

yeah

[latibule-e-deactivated20231012]

— Anne Carson, from “Red Doc>.”

[latibule-e-deactivated20231012]

— Christa Wolf, from “Cassandra.”

[chloeinletters]

Thinking about John Steinbeck’s letter to his son again.

[allthoselayersofsilence]

Lori Gottlieb, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

[archbudzar]

Mary Oliver (from In Blackwater Woods)

[heavyrain-dc]

“In the end you can’t always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.”

— Ally Condie

[briansfancies]

I’m very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence.

[kaiyonohime]

For a word to be spoken there must be silence. Both before and after. -Ursula K LeGuin

[isletic]

I’ve spent my whole life daydreaming. It embarrasses me to think of tallying the hours. It feels like ingratitude. It feels like infidelity. It’s often been about infidelity. I’ve daydreamed while walking, while running, while drinking, while smoking—sitting in the Boston cold, seventeen years old, daydreams sprouting like so many weeds from the cracked sidewalk of a broken heart. I’ve daydreamed on every form of transport—something about commuting feels conducive to daydreaming, the pockets of time in between our commitments, and the fact of the body in motion, neither here nor there, available for an elsewhere. I’ve daydreamed to music and in silence, in solitude and in company. It’s hardly exceptional.

- Leslie Jamison, Dreamers in broad daylight: ten conversations

[siir-poesia]

[twoheadedfawnn]

brianna weist

[horizontalfall]

“One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations. Isn’t it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I’ve found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated. Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes. To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure.”

— Ingmar Bergman; Interviews with Ingmar Bergman by Stig Bjorkman

[filmnoirsbian]

From Tenderhooks by Joan Tierney