mosscollector - Tumblr blog

[mosscollector]

Illusion is not a lie, it is a way of fulfilling desires.

Jean-Claude Ellena, Perfume

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Grigory Gluckmann (Russian, 1898-1973)

Daydreams

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“When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world - profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence.”

— Ingmar Bergman

[mosscollector]

She sat beside him on the bench, and her presence troubled him. He was inside the atmosphere, or light, or scent she spread, as a boat is inside the drag of a whirlpool, as a bee is caught in the lasso of perfume from the throat of a flower.

A. S. Byatt, Angels & Insects

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There was something alarming in the soft, white creature in his arms, at once so milky-wholesome and so airily untouchable.

A. S. Byatt, Angels & Insects

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The shimmering girls whirled past in the candlelight, shell-pink and sky-blue, silver and citron, gauze and tulle.

A. S. Byatt, Angels & Insects

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You need the ocean for this: to stop believing in reality. To ask yourself impossible questions. To not know. To cease knowing. To become intoxicated by the smell. To close your eyes. To stop believing in reality.

Cristina Rivera Garza, The Iliac Crest (tr. Sarah Booker)

[mosscollector]

“Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.”

— Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (via vashti)

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Her calm and sweetness were sumptuous, a thick velvet.

Fleur Jaeggy, Sweet Days of Discipline

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Just because I'm so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else's values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn't make it right. I'm ashamed of it. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I'm sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.

J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

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It takes many years to close up all the doors to your soul. And then a woman comes along, and at the first sight of her you push them all open, and you become a child again.

Dorothy Edwards, A Country House (in Rhapsody)

[mosscollector]

Of course I do see (...) that it is a great embarrassment when a young girl has lived so much alone without friends and has dreamed about the future and about love and all that sort of thing, and has made, as it were, a whole world of her own; and then suddenly someone who is not only a dream but also a fact comes into this world, and immediately this fact seems to her to fit exactly into the framework she has made, or, if it does not fit, she forces it to do so, and stands weeping and breaking her heart because she can neither give up the dreams nor the reality.

Dorothy Edwards, Sweet Grapes (in Rhapsody)

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Jan Mankes - Row of trees, 1915.

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Her reply did not surprise her although it was not at all what she would have imagined herself saying.

Joy Williams, State of Grace

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Deep silence had fallen with the starless dusk, and they leaned on each other without speaking; (...)

Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

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Interruptions shape our hours. How else can our time here be measured?

Joy Williams, State of Grace

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He didn’t know that I had an answer for which there was no question. And that one day I’d give it to him.

Joy Williams, State of Grace