I feel numb and dumb, and unable to lay hands on any words.
“
| — | From The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via larmoyante) |
But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?
“
| — | From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury |
At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon. She did not know what this chance would be, what wind would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her, if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning, as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered that it did not come; then at sunset, always more saddened, she longed for the morrow.
“
| — | From Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (via larmoyante) |
April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.
“
| — | Diaries of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka (via journalofanobody) |
What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager watcher of a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each gesture of his hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began. How long had they walked together? Three minutes? Five? Yet how large that time seemed now. How immense a figure she was on the stage before him; what a shadow she threw on the wall with her slender body! He felt that if his eye itched, she might blink. And if the muscles of his jaws stretched imperceptibly, she would yawn long before he would.
“
| — | From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury |
People were more often…blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people’s faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?
“
| — | From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury |
Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate… but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.
“
| — | The Diaries of Franz Kafka, entry from October 19, 1921 by Franz Kafka (via infinitesplinters) |
There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that’s too many. Nobody knows anyone. Strangers come and violate you. Strangers come and cut your heart out. Strangers come and take your blood.
“
| — | From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury |
The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
“
| — | From Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (via itsfromabook) |
Age makes you notice certain things. For example, I now know that a man’s life is broadly divided into three periods. During the first, it doesn’t even occur to us that one day we will grow old, we don’t think that time passes or that from the day we are born we’re all walking toward a common end. After the first years of youth comes the second period, in which a person becomes aware of the fragility of life and what begins like a simple niggling doubt rises inside you like a flood of uncertainties that will stay with you for the rest of your days. Finally, toward the end of life, the period of acceptance begins, and, consequently, of resignation, a time of waiting.
“
| — | From The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon |
The humiliation I go through
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.
when I think of my past
can only be described as grace.
We are created by being destroyed.
“
| — | By Franz Wright |
And let me ask you this: the dead,
where aren’t they?
where aren’t they?
“
| — | By Franz Wright (via faulknerandfieldnotes) |
Vex Me
Vex me, O Night, your stars stuttering like a stuck jukebox,
put a spell on me, my bones atremble at your tabernacle
of rhythm and blues. Call out your archers, chain me
to a wall, let the stone fortress of my body fall
like a rabid fox before an army of dogs. Rebuke me,
rip out my larynx like a lazy snake and feed it to the voiceless
throng. For I am midnight’s girl, scouring unlit streets
like Persephone stalking her swarthy lord. Anoint me
with oil, make me greasy as a fast-food fry. Deliver me
like a pizza to the snapping crack-house hours between
one and four. Build me an ark, fill it with prairie moths,
split-winged fritillaries, blue-bottle flies. Stitch
me a gown of taffeta and quinine, starlight and nightsoil,
and when the clock tocks two, I’ll be the belle of the malaria ball.
by Barbara Hamby
