sophi-aubrey

[sophi-aubrey]

I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful.

But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall, like seeking love in a whorehouse.

● Susan Sontag

Ph. Unknown

[sophi-aubrey]

Among the many languages that are difficult to learn,

there is silence.

● Giovanni Govoni

Ph. Josef Sudek, Spinnweben zwischen Baumen, circa 1926

[sophi-aubrey]

Time passes.

Even when it seems impossible.

Even when the chime of every second hurts like blood pulsating in wounds.

It passes unevenly, between strange scraps and prolonged calm, but it passes.

Even for me.

● Stephenie Meer, from Ne Moon

Ph. Paul Strand, Bombed Church, Hoste, Moselle, France, 1950

[sophi-aubrey]

A sense of duty without love makes you sulk.

Responsibility without love makes implacable.

Justice without love makes hard.

Sincerity without love makes you hypercritical.

Wisdom without love makes false.

Kindness without love makes hypocrites.

Order without love makes pedants.

Competence without love makes conceited.

Power without love makes cruel.

Honor without love makes arrogant.

Possession without love makes you stingy.

Faith without love makes fanatics.

The answer is always love.

● Lao-Tzu

Ph. Vladimir Bogdanov, 1990

[sophi-aubrey]

The real horror of existence is not the fear of death, but the fear of life.

It is the fear of waking up every day to face the same struggles, the same disappointments, the same pain.

It is the fear that nothing will ever change, that you are trapped in a cycle of suffering that you cannot escape.

And in that fear, there is despair, longing for something, anything, to break the monotony, to give meaning to the endless repetition of days.

● Albert Camus

Ph. Unknown

[sophi-aubrey]

For all sad words of tongue or pen,

the saddest are these:

"It might have been"

● John Greenleaf Whittier, Maud Muller

Ph. László Moholy-Nagy. Belle Isle 1926

[sophi-aubrey]

And one by one the nights between our separated cities

are joined to the night that unites us.

● PabloNeruda

Ph. Leandro Karz

[sophi-aubrey]

The language

of longing has the

intensity of

smoldering ashes

fanned by arbitrary

gusting winds.

~ c. allen

Ph. Masao Yamamoto

[sophi-aubrey]

… it is you;

you are the light around these familiar intimate things....

○ Rainer Maria Rilke

Ph. Antonio Palmerini

[sophi-aubrey]

And all the lives

we ever lived and

all the lives to be

are full of trees and

changing leaves.

© Virginia Woolf

Ph. Lucia Mohily, London, 1931

[sophi-aubrey]

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

© Bob Dylan

Ph. Pierre Le Gall

[sophi-aubrey]

Trying not to be sad is even sadder than being sad.

● Patricia Gaffney

[sophi-aubrey]

Do not assume that one who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good.

Other lives may also have much sadness and difficulty that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, they would never have been able to find these words.

● Rainer Maria Rilke

Ph. Eric Antoine

[sophi-aubrey]

There’s a universe

inside your head;

constellations of

the things you left

unsaid

○ Laren Aquilina, Talk to me

Ph. Menoevil

[sophi-aubrey]

And she got used to getting rid of everything

so as to have nothing left to lose

● Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ph. Ana Teresae Barboza

[sophi-aubrey]

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,

Gone far away into the silent land;

When you can no more hold me by the hand,

Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.

Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you plann'd:

Only remember me; you understand

It will be late to counsel then or pray.

Yet if you should forget me for a while

And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave

A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

Than that you should remember and be sad.

© Christina Georgina Rossetti

Ph. Luc Robeet

[sophi-aubrey]

Forever February 15th

Ph. Février, 2023