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there’s a dude playing vivo per lei on the accordion on the subway and all i can think about is dolan’s mommy

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some backgrounds from my WIP first year film!

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I miss him every day I live. It only grows.

Martha Gellhorn, from a letter to Rosamond Lehmann featured in Selected Letters (via violentwavesofemotion)

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Nothing can stop us!

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When they talk about the tortured genius, somebody always brings up Van Gogh— how he swallowed yellow paint because he wanted to put the sunshine inside himself. How his psychosis was probably the result of lead poisoning. They call him a miracle, but what I see is a man who was so sad, he found a beautiful way to kill himself.   They say, “it’s awful isn’t it?” They say, “It’s always the talented ones who go before their time.” And me, a nine year old kid who’s always been told they were so talented wonders when I am going to die.   We study them in school, the tortured artists. Look at all the poets who killed themselves what would their work have been without their depression? It’s it beautiful, isn’t it sad? As if depression is a parlor trick— pull it out at parties, impress all your friends. As if depression isn’t seeing how long you can go between showers before somebody notices or pizza rolls for dinner three nights in a row and then nothing the night after, because going to the store is an impossibility that you have not yet gathered the courage to conquer.   It is the least beautiful thing I’ve ever seen and we call it the mark of an artist to stand in the center of an ocean and see nothing but desert. To be seated at a feast, but still swallowing sand.   Depression is the yellow paint, the yellow paint, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT, THE YELLOW PAINT—   Art is a coping mechanism. Van Gogh is good because when he had nothing, he had paint. When he was empty, he had paint. When the world was awful, he had paint. When he hated himself, he didn’t hate the paint. He whitewashed over his own masterpieces, because it was never about being famous, it was about doing the one thing that made sense when everything else didn’t.   And they say, “without his illness, we never would have gotten all—this.” because they value his art more than his sanity because god forbid you lead a happy life and leave nothing to remember you by.

VINCENT, by Ashe Vernon (via latenightcornerstore)

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In my own person I am forced to know / How much must be forgotten out of love, / How much must be forgiven, even love.

W.H. Auden, from The English Auden: Poems, Essays & Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939; “Canzone,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

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Back from Vacation

by John Updike

“Back from vacation,” the barber announces, or the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan. They are amazed to find the workaday world still in place, their absence having slipped no cogs, their customers having hardly missed them, and there being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders, the pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas, the nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achieved in foreign languages, the beggars, the flies, the hotel luxury, the grandeur of marble cities. But at Customs the humdrum pressed its claims. Gray days clicked shut around them; the yoke still fit, warm as if never shucked. The world is still so small, the evidence says, though their hearts cry, “Not so!”

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Sandro Botticelli

LA PRIMAVERA - dettaglio

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I had to go through a time of isolation in order to come to terms with who and what I was.

James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78 (via theparisreview)

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My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.

Anna Kamienska, from In That Great River: A Notebook (via watchoutforintellect)

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Confession may be good for the soul, even necessary if the soul is to survive–it is certainly not easy. Nothing worth while is.

Tennesse Williams, from a letter to Maria St. Just featured in Five O'Clock Angel: Letters of Tennessee Williams to Maria St. Just, 1948-1982 (via violentwavesofemotion)

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Plus je vieillis et plus je trouve qu’on ne peut vivre qu’avec les êtres qui vous libèrent et qui vous aiment d’une affection aussi légère à porter que forte à éprouver.

Albert Camus (via mortdevivre)

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Als je mij aankijkt, voel ik een enorm verlangen naar voor altijd.

Romy Elmira (roomdroomt)

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I can’t turn my heart off. My heart has to be, get, touched.

Joy Kogawa, from an interview featured in in Sounding Differences: Conversations With Seventeen Canadian Women Writers (via violentwavesofemotion)