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“What I didn’t say was: I know you too well. You live your life too idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice.”

Ling Ma, Severance

“To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?”

Ling Ma, Severance

“She meant something different: she wanted to vanish; she wanted every one of her cells to disappear, nothing of her ever to be found. And since I know her well, or at least I think I know her, I take it for granted that she has found a way to disappear, to leave not so much as a hair anywhere in this world.”

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

antoniettabrandeisova :

China-rose Hibiscus, c. 1792. Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, The Botanical Magazine, Volume 5: t. 158 (1792) [S.T. Edwards]

luthienne :

Paul Tran, from All the Flowers Kneeling; "The Nightmare: Oil on Canvas: Henry Fuseli: 1781"

[Text ID: Who / can deter- / mine what's inside / another? / What is risked / when we enter?]

“When there is no love, not only the life of the people becomes sterile but the life of cities.”

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“She took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.”

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

“There’s an old ghost story about that, I remember, how the devil steals souls by asking for them openly. He isn’t a thief, but a master manipulator. The real danger, or so the story goes, isn’t in the devil himself, but in not knowing you have a choice to turn him away.”

Paula McLain, When the Stars Go Dark

writingdotcoffee :

“It’s a very excruciating life facing that blank piece of paper every day and having to reach up somewhere into the clouds and bring something down out of them.”

— Truman Capote

“Some people feel out of place when they’re young, not because anything’s wrong with them, but because there’s something special that sets them apart. Something they haven’t figured out yet.”

Paula McLain, When the Stars Go Dark

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“That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us—that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. I’ve said it before in another book, but I believe it’s worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.”

Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

feuillesmortes :

— Kristin Chang, excerpt from Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience; “Domesticity”

“For each visual input, it takes a tiny but perceptible amount of time—about two hundred milliseconds, one-fifth of a second—for the information to travel along the optic nerves and into the brain to be processed and interpreted. One-fifth of a second is not a trivial span of time when a rapid response is required—to step back from an oncoming car, say, or to avoid a blow to the head. To help us deal better with this fractional lag, the brain does a truly extraordinary thing: it continuously forecasts what the world will be like a fifth of a second from now, and that is what it gives us as the present. That means that we never see the world as it is at this very instant, but rather as it will be a fraction of a moment in the future. We spend our whole lives, in other words, living in a world that doesn’t quite exist yet.

Bill Bryson, The Body: A Guide for Occupants

flowerytale :

Franz Kafka, from Letters to Milena Suspiria, directed by Luca Guadagnino (2018) Forugh Farrokhzad, from “Another Birth” Florence and The Machine, from “Cassandra” Margaret Atwood, from “Axiom”

Daedalus and Icarus (detail) by Orazio Riminaldi Suspiria, directed by Luca Guadagnino (2018) Female Saint Holding a Book (detail) by Amico Aspertini Florence Welch, photographed by Autumn de Wilde

“But when we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.”

Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

“I hate this world. People are small. They’re ignorant, and they’re happy to stay that way. They make an effort to. They’ll spend time and energy finding ways not to learn things just to feel comfortable with their beliefs.”

Sylvain Neuvel, Only Human