[petaltexturedskies]

One thinks one has cut oneself off from the world, but it is enough to see an olive tree upright in the golden dust, or beaches glistening in the morning sun, to feel this separation melt away.

Albert Camus, in a diary entry written c. January 1936, from Notebooks 1935-1942

[neshamama]

Visit Original Link

tomi fujiyama - tennessee waltz (1960)

[neshamama]

nina simone performs “backlash blues’ at the 1976 montreux jazz festival

[tutta-mia]

[inspirationselfhelp]

East Lothian, South East of Scotland 

[artemisiasea]

“People have been scared away from the “classics” by inadequate teachers, or led to believe that writers learn only from their contemporaries. A writer who wants to write good stuff needs to read great stuff. If you don’t read widely, or read only writers in fashion at the moment, you’ll have a limited idea of what can be done with the English language.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A 21st Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story

[artemisdreaming]

Sculpture by Auguste Clésinger, “Woman Bitten by a Snake” (1847), and the painting by Edouard Manet, “Olympia” (1863), at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, in September 2015. Nicolas Krief

[figlip]

“Here I became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation, and I realized that the joy I sought in you was not only secreted within you, but breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but the shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed upon us and unappreciated.”

- Vladimir Nabokov, “Beneficience” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

[figlip]

“The centrifugal force of our planet is still fearfully strong…I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe; yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky. I love some people, whom one loves, you know, sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.”

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

[figlip]

“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?”

— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

[thatsbutterbaby]

19th century. A double shellwork sailor’s valentine in a hinged octagonal case, one side featuring a heart-shaped design and the other featuring a floral motif; case wd. 9.75, dp. 3 in.

[antigonick]

In the beginning was the sea—we heard the surf in our breathing, certain that we carried seawater in our veins.

Ilya Kaminsky, excerpt of “Traveling Musicians”, in Dancing in Odessa

[6664tennyo]

Sam, Arles, France (1997) di Nicholas Nixon

[leparfumdeladame-en-noir-deacti]

Malgré le naufrage du monde au-dessous, les oiseaux continuent de voler comme si de rien n'était…

Joseph Boyden - Le chemin des âmes

[figlip]

“An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.It isn’t that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. The possibility of life between us.”

-Adrienne Rich, from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978

[serafino-finasero]

Toni Morrison (1931–2019), U.S. author and editor (right), and Angela Davis (b. 1944), U.S. author, academic, political activist, one of the authors Morrison edited at Random House publishing company, photographed by Jill Krementz on March 28, 1974 in New York City

[figlip]

“It is not easy to live with another person, at least it is not easy for me. It makes me realize how selfish I am. It has not been easy for me to love another person either, though I am getting better at it. I can be gentle for as long as a month at a time now, before I become selfish again. I used to try to study what it meant to love someone. I would write down quotations from the works of famous writers, writers who did not interest me otherwise, like Hippolyte Taine or Alfred de Musset. For instance, Taine said that to love is to make one’s goal the happiness of another person. I would try to apply this to my own situation. But if loving a person meant putting him before myself, how could I do that? There seemed to be three choices: to give up trying to love anyone, to stop being selfish, or to learn how to love a person while continuing to be selfish. I did not think I could manage the first two, but I thought I could learn how to be just unselfish enough to love someone at least part of the time.” 

― Lydia Davis, The End of the Story