2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Love Begins
Product Placement
Xuebing Du
Show & Tell
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Origami Around
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blake kathryn
hello vonnie
titsay
if i look back, i am lost
occasionally subtle
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Kiana Khansmith
DEAR READER
Kaledo Art
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@soakinmidiamonds
To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same fields, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Beauty (Chapter III) in "Nature" (James Munroe and Company, 1836)
Do not seek immortality. It won’t come to you anyway, certainly not through your works and achievements. But the good feeling you have for others, and they for you, that goes on forever. I’m fond of quoting the poet Philip Larkin: “What will survive of us is love.” That should do it.
— Roger Rosenblatt, from "I Ain't Dead Yet" (NY Times, May 25, 2026)
"Human time, you know, passes like a dream."
— Kobo Abe, from “Noah’s Ark,” Beyond the Curve: Stories (Kodansha, 1992)
I owe the trees my health — the beauty of the blossoms, the beauty of things growing. Above all, the softness of the air breaks down my intensity.
— May Sarton, Plant Dreaming Deep (W.W. Norton & Company, 1968)
He had lived long enough to know that time and meaning were not shared out equally. Some personal eras were relatively empty. The temporal equivalent of air. And then you would come across a day—or even a minute—and it would have a whole decade’s worth of weight. It would be everything. It would have the power to change an entire life.
— Matt Haig, The Midnight Train: A Novel (Viking, May 26 , 2026)
The forwardness of life was a problem... If days could be scattered all over, so on Monday you were forty and on Tuesday you were nine and on Wednesday you were eighty-one, that would be more helpful. You would know the fleeting nature of things, realize how many versions of ourselves a lifetime contained. It would make life’s beauty so abundantly clear. The way a sunset was so beguiling because it tells us that every day eventually sinks into night.
— Matt Haig, The Midnight Train: A Novel (Viking, May 26 , 2026)
Memories and emotions are fragile things. You should never bear down on them, or draw on them by main force. You should barely touch them with the tips of your fingers, the tips of your dreams.
― Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II. Translated by Elizabeth R. Cameron. (Little, Brown and Company, 1963)
Each smallest act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time – affecting lives unknown to the one whose generous spirit was the source of this good echo.
— Dean Koontz, From the Corner of His Eye (Bantam Books, December 26, 2000
De Vierde Man (Paul Verhoeven, 1983)
Dead Man's Wire (Gus Van Sant, 2025)
Human minds are like rooms behind thick, closed curtains. What happens inside them remains forever a mystery.
Lee Heejoo, Holy Boy (translated by Joheun Lee)
I would like to spend the rest of my days in a place so silent, and working at a pace so slow, that I would be able to hear myself living.
— Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things (Viking, October 1, 2013) (via Make Believe Boutique)
...and my whole being is aching for a green, silent spot..."
— Kahlil Gibran, in a letter to Mary Haskell, from "Beloved Prophet: The Love Letters of Kahlil Gibran and Mary Haskell, and her private journal" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972)
It’s unpredictable, this stage of grief. Just when you think you have a handle on it, a crack opens up where the crazy gets in. The pain is a weather system that builds and expands, occasionally touching down, like lightning. If you have ever thrown your back out while brushing your teeth, you’re familiar with the sensation.
― Sloane Crosley, Grief Is for People (MCD, February 27, 2024)
Which was the real me: the one who had always striven to be wise and kind and calm, or the one who felt a profound indifference to all those efforts?
— Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 20 2025)
Words may fall short, but they cast long shadows that sometimes can reach the unspeakable.
— Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 20 2025)
And aren’t we always trying to get back to the happier times?
But I think of life rather like a long road we walk in one direction. By and large a lonesome walk out in the wildness of hills and wind. Mountains. Snow. And sometimes there is someone to come along and walk with you for a stretch, and sometimes (this is what I’m getting to) sometimes you see in the distance some lights and it heartens you, the lone house or maybe a village and you come into the warmth of that stopover and go inside. Maybe you have a warm supper and stay a night or maybe you stay there a few years... The stretches on the high, windblown road are far commoner than the stopovers in comfort, and aren’t we always trying to get back to the happier times? I think that is what it feels like, with Gill. I’ve spent my life trying to get back to having him even though I know I cannot.
— Virginia Evans, The Correspondent: A Novel (Crown, April 29, 2025)
