a body surrounding a song

a book quote sideblog & a personal vault

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— Gautama in the Deer Park at Benares, by Kenneth Patchen

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— Sappho

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« In fact, isn’t it a duty, in this frozen time, to meet as often as possible? So that even in the cold night watches, when all the skeletons clank, we may keep each other warm? »

— Virginia Woolf in a letter to Vita Sackville-West

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— Vita Sackville-West in a letter to Virginia Woolf

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— Vita Sackville-West in a letter to Virginia Woolf

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« I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this – But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be[…] »

— Vita Sackville-West in a letter to Virginia Woolf

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“Rooms don't change, ornaments stand where you place them: only the heart decays.”

— Graham Greene, The Quiet American

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“From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.”

― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

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“Time has its revenges, but revenge seems so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife with a husband, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God – a being capable of understanding. ”

― Graham Greene, The Quiet American

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“Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace.”

— Graham Greene, The Quiet American

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— by Ada Limón

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— by Ada Limón