I knew nothing but shadows and I thought them to be real.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (via liquidnight)
Joy and sorrow in this world pass into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.
Joseph Conrad, from “A Familiar Preface” to A Personal Record (via liquidnight)
He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.
Milan Kundera (recycled-words)
(Source: vertixe, via libraryland)
It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. Much later, when he was able to think about the things that happened to him, he would conclude that nothing was real except chance. But that was much later. In the beginning, there was simply the event and its consequences. Whether it might have turned out differently, or whether it was all predetermined from the first word that came from the stranger’s mouth, is not the question. The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.
Paul Auster, City of Glass in The New York Trilogy. Courtesy of A Piece of Monologue.
Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still-dim Milky Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring, enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn asleep till morning. The silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens and the mystery of the earth touched the mystery of the stars.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (via liquidnight)
Days begin and end in the dead of night. They are not shaped long, in the manner of things which lead to ends — arrow, road, a person’s life on earth. They are shaped round, in the manner of things eternal and stable — sun, world, God. Civilization tries to persuade us we are going towards something, a distant goal. We have forgotten that our only goal is to live, to live each and every day, and that if we live each and every day, our true goal is achieved. All civilized people see the day beginning at dawn or a little after or a long time after or whatever time their work begins; this they lengthen according to their work, during what they call ‘all day long;’ and end it when they close their eyes. It is they who say the days are long. On the contrary, the days are round.
Jean Giono, Rondeur Des Jours. Thank you, Whiskey River.
Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.
Margaret Atwood, courtesy of Whiskey River.
