The Literary Life

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain." - Louisa May Alcott

[shisasan]

𝙹𝚞𝚕𝚢 𝟷𝟿, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟶 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟶-𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟹

[ID: July 19, slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life. END ID]

[shisasan]

𝙹𝚞𝚕𝚢 𝟷𝟿, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟶 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟶-𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟹

[ID: July 19, and the poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man. END ID]

[shisasan]

write about how you feel and what’s tormenting you—write it out of your system, July 5, 1903 [From Lou Andreas-Salomé to Rainer Maria Rilke] Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: a love story in letters (1897-1926)

[cosmonautroger]

Joshua K. Jackson

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

She was reading a Russian novel. She loved Russian novels. Everyone was so emotional, so tormented. They clutched their heads, they fainted, they swooned, they galloped around. The snow.

– Joy Williams, from “Honored Guest,” Honored Guest: Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)

[random-brushstrokes]

Kenneth Procter - The Bed Sitter (1950s)

[lemaldusiecle]

Repose en paix, dear Marjane Satrapi (1969-2026).

You were my goal during my teenage years. Photographs by Rahi Rezvani 🖤

[chantssecrets]

James Baldwin with students at Bowling Green State University, 1978-9. © BGSU University

[chantssecrets]

James Baldwin in Paris, 1972, 📸 by Sophie Bassouls

[chantssecrets]

I am the man. I suffered,

I was there.

-Whitman

In Baldwin’s hand, cover page for the manuscript of Giovanni’s Room.

[macrolit]

by Langston Hughes

[quotespile]

“With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.””

— Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

[lonequixote]

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

— Dylan Thomas

[quotespile]

“If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.”

— Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

[undinesea]

A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

Susan Sontag, The Art of Fiction No. 143, from The Paris Review, issue no. 137

[beautyisanillusion]

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”

— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

[quotespile]

“European nights might be pitch-dark or coal-black, but not American nights, which are dark like a void, where there’s nothing to hold on to, no shelter from the elements, just empty, storm-whipped space, above and below.”

— Roberto Bolaño, The Insufferable Gaucho