literature blog @spiralbound - Tumblr Blog

"Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. ...Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. ...For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity."

G.K. Chesterton

havingapoemwithyou

because the color is half the taste by Paige Lewis

old-school-romantics

-Mia Hollow

lostlibrarycard

Tomihiko Morimi, The Tatami Galaxy (translated by Emily Balistrieri)

blossomfully

“If I could have done it all again, I would have loved you better. But I could not have loved you more.”

— Sue Zhao // “I loved you in all the ways that I could”

chloeinletters

The blanket of the universe wraps itself around me now via. IG

latibule-e-deactivated20231012

— Hanif Abdurraqib, from “They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.”

vulners-blog

I know it is my father's first time on this Earth, too. And I know He had it worse when he was little.

But I was little too.

— Franz Kafka, from letters to his father

aowski

“The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their “vital interests” are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the “sanctity” of human life, or the “conscience” of the civilized world. There is a “sanctity” involved with bringing a child into this world: it is better than bombing one out of it. Dreadful indeed it is to see a starving child, but the answer to that is not to prevent the child’s arrival but to restructure the world so that the child can live in it: so that the “vital interest” of the world becomes nothing less than the life of the child.”

— James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work

dailymarx

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”

— Marx, 1852

twinprime

this excerpt means everything to me you don’t understand

from The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano, 2008

lifeinpoetry

““Hell is other people” is only one side of the coin. The other side, which no one seems to mention, is also “Heaven is each other”. Hell is separateness, uncommunicability, self-centeredness, lust for power, for riches, for fame. Heaven on the other hand is very simple, and very hard: caring about your fellow beings. And that’s possible on a sustained basis only in collectivity.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre; in “Talking with Sartre” (p. 130) [edited] (via insearchofwisdom)

metamorphesque

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, from letters to Natalie Paley

[text ID: Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence.]

projectiondepartment

fuck does anyone have that poem thats like the speaker used to press her ear to conch shells when she was a child but as an adult the world has closed its second mouth or something

projectiondepartment

I FOUND IT ITS SANITY BY CAROLINE BIRD