“He has so many friends because he can turn easily from one to another, asking little from each but companionship. He has never tried a friend’s friendship to the full, is ignorant of the extent to which real friendship can be tried; and, therefore, when his own friendship is tried, it fails. He can open his heart to let lots of people in, but he can’t open it out altogether for one person; he covers his heart with half-friends to conceal its nakedness from the advances of a whole friend: he doesn’t understand that a real friend is always naked, that a real friend doesn’t have to undress but he just has no clothes to wear in front of him. He understands people so little that, when their appearances alter under altering circumstances, he is confronted by them as by strangers.”
Dylan Thomas, from a letter to Emily Holmes Coleman wr. c. January 1937
“What is it that brings on these moods of yours? Nothing mysterious: the ordinary pain of being alive.”— Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil
(via the-book-diaries)
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”— Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
(via the-book-diaries)
“I have hardly anything in common with myself.”—
Franz Kafka
“‘What are you thinking?’ the girl asked. ‘Nothing.’ ‘You have to think something.’ ‘I was just feeling.’”— Ernest Hemingway
“The villa is on the edge of the lake, we bathe and boat and go excursions into the mountains. And yet, I feel I can’t breathe. Everything is free and perfectly easy. And yet I can’t breathe. Perhaps it is one can’t live with people any more –”— D. H. Lawrence, from a letter to Catherine Carswell wr. c. August 1921
“The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land — all things born of the soul that can only be felt.”— Anthony De Sa
My words collect in my throat
like vomit
kicking to come out.
I’m yelling at us
For the way we hooked our souls together
And drove in different directions.
I’m yelling at us
For becoming the same song
And then falling out of rhythm.
-Poetry At Most
“It’s back again,” I tell you.
You ask me what it is, and I’m not sure exactly what to call it, so I tell you it’s that bird I thought I killed-The one that shits on my car every morning. It’s that sweater that still looks like his eyes and his hands and it’s been 9 months. It’s 7 days in a row on 3 hours of sleep and a stomach that tastes like guilt.
It’s a poem that explains everything, and fixes nothing.
-Poetry At Most
“The value of things is not the time they last, but the intensity with which they occur.”— Fernando Pessoa
You never forget. It must be somewhere inside you. Even if the brain has forgotten, perhaps the teeth remember. Or the fingers.
(via the-book-diaries)
Her body existed only where he touched her. The rest of her was smoke.
(via purplebuddhaquotes)
