1. 05:49 30th Jan 2012

    Notes: 1

    Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
    It’s the same when love comes to an end,
    or the marriage fails and people say
    they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
    said it would never work. That she was
    old enough to know better. But anything
    worth doing is worth doing badly.
    Like being there by that summer ocean
    on the other side of the island while
    love was fading out of her, the stars
    burning so extravagantly those nights that
    anyone could tell you they would never last.
    Every morning she was asleep in my bed
    like a visitation, the gentleness in her
    like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
    Each afternoon I watched her coming back
    through the hot stony field after swimming,
    the sea light behind her and the huge sky
    on the other side of that. Listened to her
    while we ate lunch. How can they say
    the marriage failed? Like the people who
    came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
    and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
    I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
    but just coming to the end of his triumph.
    — Jack Gilbert
     
  2. 14:05 30th Dec 2011

    Notes: 6504

    Reblogged from isalcoholacarb

    reginasworld:

    Brazilian artist Henrique Oliviera creates sculptures of tree trunks, making them look like they burst through the walls of the galleries.

     
  3. 06:35 22nd Dec 2011

    Notes: 6

    There was a woman
    I made love to and I remembered how, holding
    her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
    I felt a violent wonder at her presence
    like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
    with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
    muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
    called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
    Longing, we say, because desire is full
    of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
    But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
    the thing her father said that hurt her, what
    she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
    as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
    Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
    saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
    — Robert Hass, Meditation at Lagunitas
     
  4. 13:17 21st Dec 2011

    Notes: 4

    image: Download

    GPOYW. Jukdo Park, Busan, South Korea.

    GPOYW. Jukdo Park, Busan, South Korea.

     
  5. 13:13

    Notes: 112

    Reblogged from ryanhatesthis

    Space bears. Bears in space.

    Space bears. Bears in space.

    (Source: elifox)

     
  6. 08:16 14th Dec 2011

    Notes: 15

    Reblogged from sarzha

    Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives.
    — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Tender is the Night  (via sarzha)
     
  7. Russian critics have noted that Chekhov’s style, his choice of words and so on, did not reveal any of those special artistic preoccupations that obsessed, for instance, Gogol or Flaubert or Henry James. His dictionary is poor, his combination of words almost trivial – the purple patch, the juicy verb, the hothouse adjective, the crème-de-menthe epithet, brought in on a silver tray, these were foreign to him. He was not a verbal inventor in the sense that Gogol was; his literary style goes to parties clad in its everyday suit. Thus Chekhov is a good example to give when one tries to explain that a writer may be a perfect artist without being exceptionally vivid in his verbal technique or exceptionally preoccupied with the way his sentences curve. When Turgenev sits down to discuss a landscape, you notice that he is concerned with the trouser-crease of his phrase; he crosses his legs with an eye upon the color of his socks. Chekhov does not mind, not because these matters are not important–for some writers they are naturally and very beautifully important when the right temperament is there–but Chekhov does not mind because his temperament is quite foreign to verbal inventiveness. even a bit of bad grammar or a slack newspaperish sentence left him unconcerned. The magical part of it is that in spite of his tolerating flaws which a bright beginner would have avoided, in spite of his being quite satisfied with the man-in-the-street among words, the word-in-the-street, so to say, Chekhov managed to convey an impression of artistic beauty far surpassing that of many writers who thought they knew what rich beautiful prose was. He did it by keeping all his words in the same dim light and of the same exact tint of gray, a tint between the color of an old fence and that of a low cloud.
    — Vladimir Nabokov on Anton Chekhov in his lectures on Russian literature (via littlepotato)
     
  8. 04:47

    Notes: 1

    image: Download

    View from my apartment. Jakarta at dusk.

    View from my apartment. Jakarta at dusk.

     
  9. 17:14 6th Dec 2011

    Notes: 214

    Reblogged from whydoihaveablog

    Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in ‘sadness,’ or ‘joy,’ or ‘regret.’ Maybe the best proof that language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, ‘the happiness that attends disaster.’ Or: ‘the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.’ I’d like to show how ‘intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members’ connects with ‘the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.’ I’d like to have a word for ‘the sadness inspired by failing restaurants’ as well as for ‘the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.’ I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can’t just sit back and watch from a distance anymore.
    — Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides (via whydoihaveablog)
     
  10. 03:52 14th Nov 2011

    Notes: 1

    Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn’t been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place.
    — William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 1959