Road to hell is paved with good intentions.

"the opposite of war isn't peace. it's creation". I like books and indie music, enjoy.

[chanelbagsandcigarettedrags]

Roma, Italy

[aperiodofsoftness]

[dailybrussels]

[academicsoftie]

soft jasmine and clean cotton scented candles ♡

[marble-and-mahogany]

Dark Academia Style Inspiration

[thrpearlmoon]

Excerpt

From The Lost World

But that night, while Ty was sleeping, Livvy found herself pulled toward Dimmet Tarn again, toward the nothingness of its depths. Every time she thought of Idris, and the experiment that she and Ty would try tomorrow, she thought of her own death, of the blow that Annabel had struck. That moment of pain and dislocation. The stricken look on Julian’s face as she fled her body.

Of course Annabel wasn’t in Idris now. Annabel was dead. And of course, even if Annabel had still been alive, Livvy shouldn’t be afraid of her murderer. A Shadowhunter shouldn’t be afraid. But the thought of her own body on the cold stone of the Accords Hall, the thought of her body burnt upon a pyre, the thought of Lake Lyn, where she had returned, all of these pursued her as she sank into the blackness of Dimmet Tarn and let its nothingness hide her.

It was almost morning when at last she rose up, pearly light already sliding over the crust of snow around the tarn. And there, too, on the lip of the tarn was a small crumpled heap as if someone had dropped their hat or scarf.

Livvy drew near and saw that it was a kitten, starved and motionless. Its paws were torn by the ice, and there were marks of bright blood in the snow. Its ears were long, tipped in black, and its coat was spotted with black as well. “You poor thing,” Livvy said, and the kitten opened its eyes. It looked right at Livvy and snarled noiselessly. Then its eyes closed again.

Livvy fled back to the Scholomance, to Ty.

“Wake up, Ty!” she said. “Hurry, wake up, wake up!”

Ty sat bolt upright. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“There’s a Carpathian lynx down by Dimmet Tarn,” Livvy said. “A kitten. I think it’s dying. Hurry, Ty.”

He threw a coat over his pajamas and pulled on his boots. He bundled up a blanket in his arms. “Show me,” he said.

The kitten was still alive when they got back to Dimmet Tarn, Ty’s boots breaking through the snow with each step. He sank, sometimes, to his knees. But Livvy, of course, floated above the snow. There were advantages, sometimes, to being dead. Livvy could admit that.

You could see the small rise and fall of the lynx’s chest. Small wisps of breath rose from its black nose.

“It is going to be okay?” Livvy asked. “Will it live?”

Ty knelt down in the bank of snow beside the lynx. He began to wrap it in the blanket. “I don’t know,” he said. “But if it lives, it will be because you saved it, Livvy.”

“No,” Livvy said. “I found it. But I can’t save it. You’ll have to be the one who saves it.”

“Then we’ll both have saved it,” Ty said, and smiled at her. If Livvy had had a notebook, she would have written it down. It had been a long time since she’d seen her brother smile.

[tlcandwriting]

richard: francis is so intriguing to me, a prince of a boy, an unexplainable miracle

richard: everything henry does is worthy of worship. henry winter, actual God, a creature above this earth

richard: i am fascinated by charles. i stare at him all the time, literally 24/7

richard: i, a hetero,

[theoosterbook]

The Secret Reading List: Books mentioned in The Secret History

If you want to be as erudite and elite as the Classics Clique, you’d better add these books to your reading pile…

Specific prose/poetry/plays mentioned:

Untimely Meditations by Friedrich Nietzsche, Epigraph Republic, Book II by Plato, Epigraph Tom Swift by Victor Appleton, 6 Paradise Lost by John Milton, 8, 91 Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth, 33 The New Testament, 36 Agamemnon by Aeschylus, 40 Oresteia by Aeschylus, 40 Inferno by Dante, 41, 115 Poetics by Aristotle, 41 The Iliad by Homer, 41, 627 The Bacchae by Euripides, 42, 204 Parmenides by Plato, 67 The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, 85 Rover Boys by Edward Stratemeyer, 85 Journey from Chester to London by Thomas Pennant, 85 The Club History of London by ?, 85 The Pirates of Penzance by W.S. Gilbert, 85 Bobbsey Twins by Laura Lee Hope, 85 Marino Faliero by Lord Byron, 85 The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, 89 Sherlock Homes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 92, 622 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, 94 Mémoires by Duc de Saint-Simon, 103 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, 110 Othello by Shakespeare, 115 The World Book Encyclopedia, 117 Men of Thought and Deed by E. Tipton Chatsford Invisible Man by H.G. Wells Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up by J. M. Barrie, 180 The Divine Comedy by Dante, 184 Superman Comics, 417 The Upanishads, 441, 466 Perry Mason Novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, 442 With Rue my Heart is Laden by A.E. Housman, 466 Lycidas by John Milton, 466 The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson, 466 In Flanders Fields by John McCrae, 466 Corpus of Mycenaean Inscriptions from Knossos, 481 Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, 554 The Malcontent by John Marston, 615 The White Devil by John Webster, 615 The Broken Heart by John Ford, epilogue epigraph, 615 Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe, 616 The Revenger’s Tragedy by Cyril Tourneur, 616 Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, 619

Authors mentioned:

J.R.R. Tolkien, 6 Ezra Pound, 16 T.S. Eliot, 16 Alfred Douglas, 18 Robert de Montesquiou, 18 Plato, 22, 36 Homer, 23, 36, 49, 509 Dante, 33 Virgil, 33 Plotinus, 37 Marie Corelli, 85 Shakespeare, 91, 615 Alexander Pope, 103 John Donne, 117 Rupert Brooke, 120 Edgar Allen Poe, 132, 200 Hegel, 139 Raymond Chandler, 153 Gregory of Tours, 481 Thomas Aquinas, 509 P.G. Wodehouse, 538 George Orwell, 576-7 Harold Acton, 577 Salman Rushdie, 582 Agatha Christie, 587 Proust, 612 John Webster, 615 Thomas Middleton, 615 Cyril Tourneur, 615 John Ford, 615 Christopher Marlowe, 615 Walter Raleigh, 615 Thomas Nashe, 615

NB: page numbers correspond to the Popular Penguin Edition.

[riverselkie-deactivated20190510]

how to be a donna tartt character

wear old-fashioned clothes in all black or all white, odd glasses are a bonus

have weird nicknames with your friends and only refer to each other by them

intellectualism™ is important. make sure everyone knows that you love homer more than them

moral ambiguity is slightly more important. wanna scam people with fake antiques? wanna murder a friend? wanna steal your stepmom’s dog and drugs and run away across america? wanna semi-accidentally steal a painting and worry about it for years? wanna get into an ecstatic state and murder some random farmer? no time like the present

speak a few languages, preferably dead ones or russian

embrace your angst. amplify your angst. worry

consume copious amounts of substances. smoke, develop a drug problem, get sick drinking as often as possible

forget having actual romantic relationships with people, instead opt for romanticizing someone and obsessing over them and then confessing your love unsuccessfully or being totally gay for your best friend and then denying it later when they try to bring it up

[antigonick]

“We were always surrounded by books and words and poetry, all the fierce passions of the world bound in leather and vellum.”

— M. L. Rio, If We Were Villains (read the excerpt here)

[ronansparrishs-deactivated20200]

for fans of the secret history

go read if we were villains

It has

• blood and murder

• boys loving boys and boys loving girls and boys having complete disregard of gender altogether

• Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare

• pretentious people who live and breathe shakespeare (the shakespeare is important)

• tension so thick between people you could cut it with a knife

• mystery and dying and lakes and drugs and prisons

• go read the book seriously

[tlcandwriting]

Charles: I blame Henry for this. And Francis too, I blame him also.

Francis: What did I do?

Charles: I'm sure you did something.

[tlcandwriting]

Henry: You all think I enjoy being mother hen to you all?

Richard:

Francis:

Camilla:

Bunny:

Charles:

Henry: Okay fine, it's like a crack to me.

[adamewriter]

“WHERE IS THIS MUSIC COMING FROM??”

[fuckyeahsmoshgames]

Wes: “We were all thinking it, Boze is the only one who said it!”   [ ► ]

[mcgonagollygee]

i want to talk about the characterizations of ben wyatt and jake peralta. arguably jim halpert could be included in this conversation, but i want to focus on ben and jake because they’re such clear subversions of well-known tropes

firstly, you have ben wyatt. the nerd. he’s established as a hard-ass and a geek early on, and it would have been so easy for the writers to fall into that trope of presenting him as below leslie, as her eventual agreement to date him has a victory for all male nerds, because he had successfully tricked a woman into being interested in him. 

instead, we get ben wyatt, a dork and a feminist. he’s nationally ranked in settlers of catan and he likes to sit around in a batman costume and he loves game of thrones. he also loves his girlfriend enough to lose his job for her, and it’s never even addressed whether he minds that leslie will probably end up with a higher status job than him - because why would he? he loves and supports her, and his nerdiness is presented not as a flaw, but as a complement to her single-minded determination - they’re both total nerds with an overlapping ven diagram of interests.

secondly, jake peralta. the character we’re introduced to in the first episode is cocky and a smartass, and while he’s loveable, we completely understand why he would drive amy up a wall. jake and amy are less alike than ben and leslie are; arguably they’re opposites. again, there’s a trope that the show could have fallen into: “endearing idiot eventually wears down woman who is too good for him, and she realizes she was too uptight all along”.

but again, we get something completely different. jake peralta, known for being Too Much, consistently respects amy’s boundaries and tries as hard as he can to be honest about his feelings, while understanding that amy is her own person. she buys orange soda for him and he gets a new mattress for her. there are so many examples of the respect in that relationship - they’re both so stubborn, but they love each other so much. he’s always known that she was going to be his boss. they’re different, but they love it about each other.

all i’m saying is, this purposeful subversion of gross male stereotypes is so important - and so much easier (and so much funnier!) than people think

[parksandwreckreation]

why would they ever delete this scene