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“Everything is invented. Language. Childhood. Careers. Relationships. Religion. Philosophy. The future. They are not there for the plucking. They don’t exist in some natural state.”

— Maira Kalman

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I want the following word: splendor, splendor is fruit in all its succulence, fruit without sadness. I want vast distances. My savage intuition of myself.

Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life (via thewriterscaravan)

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“These women are navigating their interior commotion — their death postponed, it feels — as if it were a nightmare, or a day off, or another inexpressible world running alongside their own, where, again, they are expected to be “fine”: to heal quickly, to be mothers and wives, to trust doctors and lovers. To be articulate about whatever intensities are submerging them, without, as Giuliana puts it, ending up with a “bunch of words strung together.” They’d like meaning, purpose, and the kind of connective passion that returns a woman to her body. Their lives bring to mind a line from Anaïs Nin’s The Four-Chambered Heart, in which the main character, Djuna, tells her lover Rango, “I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.””

— The Mask of Monica Vitti by Durga Chew-Bose  (via localchurel)

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Sridevi in Chandni (1989)

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Marie Howe, “The Gate” in What the Living Do

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Rohmer Interior #4

Le beau mariage (A Good Marriage) - Eric Rohmer - 1982

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On dark, dull days revisit Wong Kar Wai.

Chungking Express (1994) dir. Wong Kar Wai

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In my experience—and this is a very awkward way to put it, since I don’t really know what the word experience means—the strangest people in one’s life are the people one has known and loved, still know and will always love. Here, both I and the vocabulary are in trouble, for strangest does not imply stranger. A stranger is a stranger is a stranger, simply, and you watch the stranger to anticipate his next move. But the people who elicit from you a depth of attention and wonder which we helplessly call love are perpetually making moves which cannot possibly be anticipated. Eventually, you realize that it never occurred to you to anticipate their next move, not only because you couldn’t but because you didn’t have to: it was not a question of moving on to the next move, but simply, of being present. Danger, true, you try to anticipate it and you prepare yourself, without knowing it, to stand in the way of death. For the strangest people in the world are those people recognized, beneath one’s senses, by one’s soul—the people utterly indispensable for one’s journey.

Just Above My Head, James Baldwin (via sorayaking)

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Arundhati Roy (1990s)

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To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.

Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living (via bookmania)

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#resist (at West Side Highway)

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at Bushwick