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Czeslaw Milosz, Notebook.

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Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist

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elaborate book covers

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Milena Jesenská’s obituary for Franz Kafka

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And me? who am I? How have they categorized me? Have they given me a number? I feel numbered, and constricted all over. I barely fit inside myself. I am just a little me, very unimportant.

Clarice Lispector, from "Brasília" in Complete Stories

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"For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl. The great advantage men have is that our culture allows two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man. The beauty of a boy resembles the beauty of a girl. In both sexes it is a fragile kind of beauty and flourishes naturally only in the early part of the life-cycle. Happily, men are able to accept themselves under another standard of good looks — heavier, rougher, more thickly built. A man does not grieve when he loses the smooth, unlined, hairless skin of a boy. For he has only exchanged one form of attractiveness for another: the darker skin of a man’s face, roughened by daily shaving, showing the marks of emotion and the normal lines of age. There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to want to continue looking like girls." — Excerpt from Susan Sontag's 1978 essay The Double Standard of Aging

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A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, 1946)

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me to myself

A greeting for negligent penpals and procrastinating authors. Postcard from my collection, 1911.

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kind of weird how parts of your soul are left in various locations without any warning… like yes i’m always at the top of that hill, sitting at the bus stop, in the cool light of the Japanese restaurant, standing at the pier etc etc

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Rijksmuseum Research Library, Amsterdam (published online on January 29, 2025)

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"'I have led a toothless life,' he thought. 'A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on--and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What's to be done?'"

-Jean-Paul Sartre, The Age of Reason (1945)

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"Absolutely no one comes to save us but us."

Ismatu Gwendolyn, "you've been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress)", from Threadings, on Substack [ID'd]

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Simone de Beauvoir, from Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 1, 1926-27

Text ID: my solitude is an intoxication: I am, I'm in control, I love myself, and I scorn everything else.

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Simone de Beauvoir, from a diary entry featured in Diary of a Philosophy Student

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—  Banana Yoshimoto, “Kitchen”