curious...

[soracities]

Every book is for someone. The act of writing may be solitary, but it is always a reach toward another person – a single person – since every book is read alone. The writer does not know for whom she writes. The reader’s face is invisible, and yet, every sentence inscribed on a page represents a bid for contact and a hope for understanding.

Siri Hustvedt, from the Author’s Note, in Living, Thinking, Looking (via soracities)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

You have to create your own space which has a lot of silence in it and a lot of books.

Susan Sontag, from an interview conducted c. October 1979 (via violentwavesofemotion)

[poetryconcrete]

Driftwood Stump, photography by Edward Weston, 1937.

[quotespile]

Language is the square hole we keep trying to jam the round peg of life into. It’s the most insane thing we do.

Robert Coover, Gerald’s Party (via quotespile)

[philosophybits]

It is more of a job to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.

Michel de Montaigne, Essais (via philosophybits)

[oddfilmstills]

dark (2017)

[buddhajourney]

This mindfulness practice is we should do with anger

A psychologist walked around a room while teaching stress management to an audience. As she raised a glass of water, everyone expected they’d be asked the “half empty or half full” question. Instead, with a smile on her face, she inquired: “How heavy is this glass of water?”

Answers called out ranged from 8 oz. to 20 oz.

She replied, “The absolute weight doesn’t matter. It depends on how long I hold it. If I hold it for a minute, it’s not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my arm. If I hold it for a day, my arm will feel numb and paralyzed. In each case, the weight of the glass doesn’t change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.”

She continued, “The stresses and worries in life are like that glass of water. Think about them for a while and nothing happens. Think about them a bit longer and they begin to hurt. And if you think about them all day long, you will feel paralyzed – incapable of doing anything.”

Remember to put the glass down.

[thelifeisabsurd]

I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me. - Oscar Wilde / The Picture of Dorian Gray

Thelifeisabsurd (via thelifeisabsurd)

[thelifeisabsurd]

you must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame; how could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?

_ Nietzsche

[bsd-bibliophile]

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.

Franz Kafka (via bsd-bibliophile)

[wordsnquotes]

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.

Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (via wordsnquotes)

[philosophybits]

He who learns but does not think, is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.

Confucius, Analects (via philosophybits)

[best-life-wisdom]

I no longer force things. what flows flows, what crashes, crashes. I only have space and energy for things that are meant for me.

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

To make the right choices in life, you have to get in touch with your soul. To do this, you need to experience solitude, which most people are afraid of, because in the silence you hear the truth and know the solutions.

Deepak Chopra (via thatkindofwoman)

[whentherewerebicycles]

The student is put outside of society, on a campus. Furthermore, he is excluded while being transmitted a knowledge which is traditional in nature, obsolete, ‘academic’ and not directly tied to the needs and problems of today […] Young people from 18 to 25 are thus, as it were, neutralized by and for society, rendered safe, ineffective, socially and politically castrated. There is the first function of the university: to put students out of circulation.

Foucault, “Rituals of Exclusion” (1971 interview)

[poeticsofdeath]

Only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the total strangeness of beings overwhelm us. Only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder. Only on the ground of wonder - the revelation of the nothing - does the “why?” loom before us. Only because the “why” is possible as such can we in a definite way inquire into grounds, and ground them. Only because we can inquire and ground is the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher. The question of the nothing puts us, the questioners, in question. It is a metaphysical question.

Martin Heidegger, What is Metaphysics? (1929)

[poeticsofdeath]

Philosophy is depression in its purest form; to be philosophical is to be ill. It is an error of the mind, a disgusting sickness, to think in a metaphysical sense. To obsessively ponder about purpose and meaning in a universe so clearly devoid of these things should be classified as a type of psychosis.