every departure is at once a return

24

[joybank]

Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

[joybank]

Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

[joybank]

Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

[joybank]

cr The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

[booksivereadandwanttoremember]

“‘But you say, come into our brotherhood and we’ll show you the meaning of life and the destiny of man, and the laws that govern the universe. But who are we? Just people. How do you come to know it all? Why am I the only one who can’t see what you see? You see the earth as a kingdom of goodness and truth. I don’t.’”

—Leo Tolstoy “War and Peace” (1869).

[hoursofreading]

“Reading good books, always studying, regardless of the work she intends to do, should be a part of every girl’s plan for her life. The only way not to let what we’ve gained be taken away from us is to be smart and capable, to learn to design the world better than men have so far done.”

— We Tell a Story and Try to Do Our Best | Elena Ferrante

[proustian-dream]

Emily Dickinson

[theoptia]

Arseny Tarkovsky, from Eurydice

Text ID: And I dream of a different soul / Dressed in other clothes: / Burning as it runs / From timidity to hope, / Spiritous and shadowless / Like fire it travels the earth, / Leaves lilac behind on the table / To be remembered by.

[total-derangement-of-the-senses]

233 [10 Apr 1930]

The whole life of the human soul is just a movement in the half-light. We live in a twilight of consciousness never sure about what we are or what we think we are. Even in the best of us there exists some feeling of vanity about something, some error whose dimensions we cannot calculate. We are something that happens in the interval of a play; sometimes, through certain doors, we glimpse what may only be the scenery. The whole world is confused, like voices in the night.

– Fernando Pessoa, The Book Of Disquiet, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa

[petaltexturedskies]

Virginia Woolf, The Years

[richardanarchist]

Farewell to Arcady

With sombre mien, the Evening gray Comes nagging at the heels of Day, And driven faster and still faster Before the dusky-mantled Master, The light fades from her fearful eyes, She hastens, stumbles, falls, and dies.

Beside me Amaryllis weeps; The swelling tears obscure the deeps Of her dark eyes, as, mistily, The rushing rain conceals the sea. Here, lay my tuneless reed away,— I have no heart to tempt a lay.

I scent the perfume of the rose Which by my crystal fountain grows. In this sad time, are roses blowing? And thou, my fountain, art thou flowing,

While I who watched thy waters spring Am all too sad to smile or sing? Nay, give me back my pipe again, It yet shall breathe this single strain: Farewell to Arcady!

Paul Laurence Dunbar

[oblivion-soave]

“That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.”

— Ali Smith, Winter

[total-derangement-of-the-senses]

I read and I am set free. I gain objectivity. I have ceased to be my usual disparate self. And what I read, rather than being a near-invisible suit that sometimes weighs on me, becomes instead the great clarity of the outside world, in which everything is worthy of note, the sun that everyone can see, the moon that weaves a web of shadows on the still earth, the vast spaces that open out into the sea, the dark solidity of the trees waving aloft their green branches, the solid peace of ponds in gardens, the paths thick with vines on the terraced slopes of the hills.

– Fernando Pessoa, The Book Of Disquiet, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa

[huariqueje]

Fresh Pots - Vincent Giarrano , 2024.

American , b. 1960 -

Oil , c. 18 x 24 in.

[petaltexturedskies]

I heard a bird sing in the dark of December. A magical thing and sweet to remember. "We are nearer to Spring than we were in September," I heard a bird sing in the dark of December.

Oliver Herford, from "I Heard a Bird Sing" in Welcome Christmas! A Garland of Poems

[petaltexturedskies]

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

[apoemaday]

Dust of Snow

by Robert Frost

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.