“I Can Shake Off Everything As I Write; My Sorrows Disappear, My Courage Is Reborn.”

“If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint”, then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”

— Vincent van Gogh 

There was a star riding through clouds one night and I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Annotated)

“I do understand—and it is terrible.”

— Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer written c. July 1915, featured in “Letters to Felice,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

La pureté est absolument invulnérable en tant que pureté (...). Mais elle est éminemment vulnérable en ce sens que toute atteinte du mal la fait souffrir (S. Weil, Pesanteur, 1943, p. 79).

Constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want. - Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), German historian and philosopher

“I can’t think of a better way to revenge someone who tried to break you, than to live and love life more without them.”

— Innocent Mwatsikesimbe 

““I miss dreaming forwards,” Anna said. “What?” “I dream backwards now. You won’t believe how backwards you’ll dream someday.””

— Marina Keegan, The Opposite of Loneliness (via quoted-books)

May Sarton, from Recovering: A Journal

[He] felt that the murky twilight which was gradually seeping into the room was also slowly penetrating his body, transforming his blood into fog, and that he was powerless to stop the spell that was being cast on him by the twilight.

Vladimir Nabokov, Mary, 1926

T.S. Eliot, from “III. The Fire Sermon”, Collected Poems, 1909-1962