[baketamon]

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

Sir John Lubbock, The Use of Life, 1894

[philosophybits]

It is the most foolish of all errors for young people of good intelligence to imagine that they will forfeit their originality if they acknowledge truth already acknowledged by others.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections (via philosophybits)

[booksqouted]

I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (via booksqouted)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I can no longer fall asleep at all, the next day is insupportable and I destroy myself.

Franz Kafka, from a diary entry featured in The Diaries Of Franz Kafka: 1910 - 1923  (via kafkaesque-world)

[unencumberedbylogic]

It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

David Foster Wallace, ‘Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed’ in Consider the Lobster  (via kafkaesque-world)

[intellectualpoaching]

‘How far we are!’ he sighed. 'From what?’ 'From ourselves.’

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Of Love and other Demons (via intellectualpoaching)

[baketamon]

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business.

George Orwell, Can Socialists Be Happy?

[kafkaesque-world]

If we value our lives, let us abandon it all… I am forever fettered to myself, that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.

Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice (via kafkaesque-world)

[coral]

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Gustave Flaubert (via feellng)

[kafkaesque-world]

Oh God, I wish you were not on this earth, but entirely within me, or rather that I were not on this earth, but entirely within you; I feel there is one too many of us; the separation into two people is unbearable.

Franz Kafka, from Letters to Felice  (via kafkaesque-world)

[haya-deactivated20140521]

“I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones.”

Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena  (via kafkaesque-world)

[wordsnquotes]

“Perhaps it was only that when you try to put it into words you cannot express it truly, it never sounds as you dream it.”

Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (via wordsnquotes)

[scientific-delirium-madness]

"In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question."

Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (via scientific-delirium-madness)

[baketamon]

Do not waken dreams no longer precious, Hope never fulfilled do not excite. It was my misfortune to experience Loss and weariness too early in my life.

Sergei Yesenin, Letter to Mother

[mournjargon]

And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with the storm, that far-off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (via insomnius)

[stellarcollectswords]

I could not discuss what had happened to me with anyone, I could not even admit it to myself; and, while I never thought about it, it remained, nevertheless, at the bottom of my mind, as still and as awful as a decomposing corpse. And it changed, it thickened, it soured the atmosphere of my mind.

James Baldwin , Giovanni’s Room.  (via stockholmcollectswords)

[inoperable-whining]

…this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality…

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room (via inoperable-whining)