Expendable Dreamer

Lost in the heat of it all

[expendabledreamer]

[expendabledreamer]

“Honey.” She laughs. “I’m a cynic. And a cynic is a romantic who’s too scared to hope.”

-Funny Story, Emily Henry

[expendabledreamer]

Justice is dignity.

[expendabledreamer]

[expendabledreamer]

[expendabledreamer]

But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

-Circe, Madeline Miller

[expendabledreamer]

I have never understood why helping mortals made Zeus so angry.”

“Tell me,” he said, “who gives better offerings, a miserable man or a happy one?”

“A happy one, of course.”

“Wrong,” he said. “A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.”

“But surely,” I said, “you have to reward him eventually. Otherwise, he will stop offering.”

“Oh, you would be surprised how long he will go on. But yes, in the end, it’s best to give him something. Then he will be happy again. And you can start over.”

-Circe

[expendabledreamer]

Odysseus had told me a story once about a king who had a wound that could not be healed, not by any doctor, not by any amount of time. He went to an oracle and heard its answer: only the man who had given the wound could fix it, with the same spear he had used to make it. So the king had limped across the world until he found his enemy, who mended him.

I wished Odysseus were there so I could ask him: but how did the king get that man to help him, the one who had struck him so deep?

The answer that came to me was from a different tale. Long ago, in my wide bed, I had asked Odysseus: “What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?”

He’d smiled in the firelight. “That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.”

Circe, Madeline Miller

[stay-close]

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow.”

— Vincent van Gogh

[expendabledreamer]

'Can no one stop her?'

'Zeus could, or your father, if they wished to. But why would they? Monsters are a boon to gods. Imagine all the prayers.'

-Circe, Madeline Miller

[expendabledreamer]

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced-or seemed to face-the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you lust so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

[nixscriptum]

the lover’s almanac : part one.

[nixscriptum]

the lovers almanac : part two

[mournfulroses]

Martha Gellhorn, from a letter to Bernard Berenson featured in The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn

[expendabledreamer]

As the poet and Francophone Aimé Césaire said, “a civilisation that plays fast and loose with its principles is a dying civilisation.”

[expendabledreamer]

[expendabledreamer]

[expendabledreamer]

This made me giggle XD