late night reading

xvii | intj | dark academia | philosophy and classic literature

[ashortstorycalledlife]

Maybe I'm just doing all of it to impress someone. And that someone could sometimes just be an imaginary viewer, watching the aesthetic film-like life that I'm showing off each day.

[ashortstorycalledlife]

the more time passes, the more my memory of you starts drifting away. I'm scared to forget about the way your hugs felt. the way you used to mean the world to me. I already forgot your smell and I don't know if I can remember your laugh. did you ever laugh? it all looks so blurred from here. did you ever even exist? maybe you were just a dream.

[theundergroundwoman]

when dostoyevsky said your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing and when shakespeare said this above all: to thine own self be true

[ashortstorycalledlife]

01/10/2021

Sweet sweet October and a rainy day. I think I just found the cutest café in all of my city.

Current read: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami. I think of the Murakamis I have read (Norwegian Woods and Kafka on the Shore), this will be my favorite for now.

Highly recommend reading Murakami in fall, it's just the perfect mixture of comfort, calmness, beautiful words, mystery and melancholy.

[ashortstorycalledlife]

07/06/2021

I finished The Song of Achilles (by the end of which I was sobbing btw) and this one has been sitting on my shelf for a while, waiting to be read. The Silence of the Girls is also about the Trojan War but from a completely different perspective, one that is far too often left out in ancient myths and legends: the women's.

[ashortstorycalledlife]

29/05/2021

"Name one hero who was happy."

I considered. Heracles went mad and killed his family; Theseus lost his bride and father; Jason's children and new wife were murdered by his old; Bellerophon killed the Chimera but was crippled by the fall from Pegasus' back.

"You can't." He was sitting up now, leaning forward.

"I can't."

"I know. They never let you be famous AND happy." He lifted an eyebrow. "I'll tell you a secret."

"Tell me." I loved it when he was like this.

"I'm going to be the first." He took my palm and held it to his. "Swear it."

"Why me?"

"Because you're the reason. Swear it."

"I swear it," I said, lost in the high color of his cheeks, the flame in his eyes.

"I swear it," he echoed.

We sat like that a moment, hands touching. He grinned.

"I feel like I could eat the world raw."

'The Song of Achilles' - Madeline Miller

[classicsclique]

oscar wilde

[ashortstorycalledlife]

11/05/2021

Reading: a text on positivism in theory of knowledge. At this point everything is interesting to me unless it's Kant. Shorten your phrases and be less stuck up please, thank you.

[plantsbooks]

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of falling in love with a book

[somnolentsuggestions]

being individuals together is so intimate. let’s read different books but curled up next to each other, let’s visit a coffee shop so you can study & i can write, let’s just be near each other

[ms-37]

be yourself people don’t have to like you and you don’t have to care

[newvision]

— The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

[exitwound]

when whitman said “i contradict myself. i am large… i contain multitudes” and wilde said “what are you? to define is to limit” and sumney said “i insist upon my right to be multiple”

[existential-celestial]

and ashbery said “accept yourself as numerous”

[soracities]

and when mahmoud darwish said “I am besieged by contradiction” and when lewis carroll said “I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then”

[typewriterdaily]

Sometimes you read a line from a book and it’s like something from your own head or something from your journal. And that part of you is a bit more defined, a bit sharper, and a bit easier to understand and explain to others.

[ashortstorycalledlife]

02/09/2020

A person's bookshelf tells you so much about them. Can you honestly walk past one without taking a closer look and wondering what each book means to them? Whether they like it or not? How it found it's way into their life?

[ashortstorycalledlife]

11/08/2020

I'm trying really hard to get into a productive mindset since I'm going back to school tomorrow but I'm not really feeling it. I don't even have a planner. Pathetic.

[mulderscully]

i wish some people understood that you can genuinely and truly love something and still be critical of it and call it out when it needs to be called out. that's how love works in any form.