A

[liroforoceleste]

Vladimir Nabokov - The Art of Literature and Commonsense

[liroforoceleste]

Je me vois m'écouler: il ne passe aucun moment que je ne me voie sur le point d'être englouti. Mais puisque Dieu soutient les élus, en sorte qu'ils ne sont jamais submergés, je crois fermement que je demeurerai en dépit des orages.

Calvino

[liroforoceleste]

When two great civilisations, utterly foreign to each other, come into direct contact, it seems that, at first, they cannot exchange anything but blows and trinkets. Mutual access to the core of their respective cultures necessitates a lengthy and complex process. It demands patience and humility, for outsiders are normally not allowed beyond a certain point: they will not be admitted to the inner chambers of the spirit, unless they are willing to shed some of their original baggage. Cultural initiation entails metamorphosis, and we cannot learn any foreign values if we do not accept the risk of being transformed by what we learn.

The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays - Simon Leys

[liroforoceleste]

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy,intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

Oscar Wilde - De Profundis

[liroforoceleste]

I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering

Oscar Wilde - De Profundis

[liroforoceleste]

The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendour that is towering above us, is probably the saddest urge of human nature.

Simon Leys 

[austinkleon]

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Doris Lessing, 1971 introduction to The Golden Notebook (via austinkleon)

[liroforoceleste]

El que se endiosa necesita verse y sentirse como un dios para el otro, en el otro. Y como la especie de Dios que le sirve como patrón —inconscientemente— corresponde a épocas religiosas muy primitivas pide, como ellos, víctimas, pues solamente alzándose sobre una víctima o un montón de víctimas el que no es un Dios puede hacerse la ilusión de serlo.

María Zambrano -  Persona y democracia: La historia sacrificial.

[liroforoceleste]

All people seem criminally irrelevant. I ignore everyone and everything, and, if crossed or interrupted in my decay, hate. Nature is only the irking weather and flowers crude reminders of stale states of being.

Elizabeth Smart - By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept

[liroforoceleste]

Ya el pobre corazón eligió su camino. Ya a los vientos no oscila, ya a las olas no cede, al azar no suspira, ni se entrega al Destino... Ahora sabe querer, y quiere lo que puede. Renunció al imposible y al sin querer divino.

Manuel Machado - El poeta de “Adelfos” dice al fin

[liroforoceleste]

Mi voluntad se ha muerto una noche de luna en que era muy hermoso no pensar ni querer...

Manuel Machado - Adelfos

[liroforoceleste]

Yo nací libre, y para poder vivir libre escogí la soledad de los campos. Los árboles destas montañas son mi compañía, las claras aguas destos arroyos mis espejos; con los árboles y con las aguas comunico mis pensamientos y hermosura. Fuego soy apartado y espada puesta lejos. A los que he enamorado con los ojos he desengañado con las palabras.

Don Quijote de la Mancha, Primera parte, Capítulo XIV

[liroforoceleste]

Entregados al mal y a los deseos, aman la sangre y los placeres turbios, el vértigo infinito de los labios, el peligro que acecha tras las curvas. Pero su cuerpo es bello y seductores son sus ojos como ramos de lilas, hay huertos escondidos en sus labios, cálidos ríos en su piel nocturna. Todo se desconoce de su origen. Son una raza extraña de fulgores hermosos. Ancho dolor de deseos. Les darías la vida como un ebrio, porque hay rosas de amor en sus labios, y nada importa el mal en cuerpos bellos.

Luis Antonio de Villena -  Querubes, de El viaje a Bizancio

[theclassicsreader]

Month by month things are losing their hardness; even my body now lets the light through; my spine is soft like wax near the flame of the candle. I dream; I dream.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via theclassicsreader)

[relatosdeundiadelluvia]

Más terrible que cualquier muro, coloqué rejas altísimas delimitando el jardín de mi ser, de manera que, viendo yo perfectamente a los otros, perfectísimamente los excluyo y los mantengo otros.

Libro del desasosiego - Fernando Pessoa (via relatosdeundiadelluvia)

[liroforoceleste]

Minhas mesmas emoções São coisas que me acontecem

Fernando Pessoa - Un corazón de nadie (antología poética 1913-1935)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

It didn’t happen to me, it happened in me.

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in Henry and June: From “A Journal of Love” -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin (1931-1932)