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i am making eye contact normally. i am looking for the right amount of time. i am signalling that i am interested in what you are saying. i am looking away to avoid staring. i am once again making eye contact so as not to appear bored. i am worrying that when i looked away you may have thought i was looking at your socks and that that might be weird. i am trying to work out how to explain myself without sounding insane if you confront me about that. i am concerned that while i’ve been thinking about that i’ve been making too much eye contact. i am looking away again. i looked away too quickly and that was weird. i’m trying to work out how hard i’m beefing it based on your expression. i am unable to tell. i am suddenly very aware of how wide open my eyes are. i am trying to close them slightly without looking like i’m narrowing my eyes at you. i have made a muscle in my face start twitching. i am making eye contact normally. i am making eye contact normally.

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mornings like this

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for the next emoji update they should add an ouroboros

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celebrating new laptop stickers and finishing papers/master’s with generous doses of iced coffee

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“There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened between us, like ostyt, which can be used for a cup of  tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room, and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet, which is to want something so much over months and even years that when you get it, you have lost the desire.”

— Barbara Hamby, from ‘Letter to a Lost Friend’ (via halcynth)

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Instagram credit: thenovelacademy

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Flowers details in Palazzo Ducale — Urbino, Italy

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Going to a library with someone you love and sitting in a corner with your head propped up on their shoulder while you both are reading books in peace and calm is the most intimately wholesome thing ever.

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— vladimir nabokov, in a letter to his wife [24 march 1937] from letters to véra (trans. olga voronina & brian boyd)

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Palazzo Ducale — Urbino, Italy

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When she’s asleep, I see her youth. I never understood when people said that sleeping makes people look peaceful, they’re just sleeping. With her, I get it. She falls into a neutrality and youth that allows me to picture her and only her. Her story, her fears, her beauty, her nativity, it’s all on display in her peaceful vulnerability of rest.

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“It is a curious thing, the death of a loved one. We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.”

— Lemony Snicket, Horseradish

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who were you before all the books you read?

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“I’d planned to die at thirty, and then I’d push it on ten years, forty, and then fifty. You always push it on. And then you go on and on and on. It’s difficult. Too much trouble. I’ve thought about death a great deal. One day in the snow I felt so tired. I thought, “Damn it, I’ll sit down. I can’t go on. I’m tired of living here in the snow and ice.” So I sat down on the ground. But it was so cold I got up. Oh yes, I used to try to imagine death, but I always come up against a wall.”

— Jean Rhys (via booradleyy)

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Scientific Area in the library of Università degli Studi di Urbino — Urbino, Italy

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During a lecture on epic poetry like the Mahābhārata and Iliad in my first year of college, my professor said, “When the whole world dies, even when brick and mortar is destroyed, memory survives. It survives and lives on in generations to come. And literature carries that memory. All your geography, your economics, your psychology, they’re all based on the memory of man, passed down generations after generations. These epic poems and literature we are studying right now is to remind us that we too will be memories one day. And therefore, let us be good memories” and I think a piece of this lecture will live on in me wherever I go.