cracklit

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— July 3, 1913 / Franz Kafka diaries

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“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

“And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.”

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“[…] the openness to revelation. Which is another way of saying, to being wrong about what is possible and true.”

— Karen Russell, from “The Ghost Birds”

But, anyway, aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter?

— Mary Oliver, from “Snowy Night”

“In the end I would rather wonder than know.”

— Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey

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why does the pendulum have to be a sword

why does the pendulum have to swing so hard

[cracklit]

“For whom does dawn open my eye’s window, for whom does it blaze a path between my ribs?”

— Adonis, from First Poems; Labor Pains. Trans. Khaled Mattawa. 

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“The sea is not a surface. It is, from top to bottom, an abyss. If you want to cross the sea, sink.”

— Pascal Quignard, The Hatred of Music

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Tonight everything hurts, not only the separation, but this terrible hunger of body and mind for you which every day you are increasing, stirring more and more. 

Anaïs Nin, from ‘A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller 1932-1953′

[cracklit]

“The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at.”

— Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (via thirdity)

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“Yes, me, I prefer the hourglass so you can smash it when I tell you of eternity’s lie”

— Paul Celan, “[Blinded by giant leaps],” Romanian Poems (Green Integer, 2003)

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Sharon Olds

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Letters to Milena

F. Kafka

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an interview with didion

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"The fish trap exists because of the fish. Once you've gotten the fish you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit. Once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are there for the intent. Once you've gotten the intent, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can speak with him?"

-Zhuangzi

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“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions remov’d by death, and cou’d I neither think, nor feel, nor see, nor love, nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I shou’d be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity. If any one, upon serious and unprejudic'd reflection thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continu'd, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.”

—David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

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*sighs dreamily* what a fucking weirdo

[cracklit]

𝙳𝚎𝚌𝚎𝚖𝚋𝚎𝚛 𝟿, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟹 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟶-𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟹

[ID: To put up with oneself calmly, without being precipitate, to live as one must, not to chase one’s tail like a dog. END ID]