• 01 — camille deangelis bones and all
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

i was beautiful and brave, someone destined to love and survive, to be happy and to remember.

memories distort themselves, turning over into truths that are easier to live with.

the morning after mama left i went into the kitchen and threw a dish on the floor just to see what it felt like.

i only found people like me in storybooks i read in the library. giants. trolls. witches. the minotaur. if this were a greek epic, i would be the hero's narrow escape. the heroine never ate anybody, and the nasty man eating giants all got their comeuppance. what i was expecting? someone like me could never be a good one.

eventually i realized something, whenever you tell yourself, this time it will be different, it's as good as a promise that it'll turn out the same as it always was.

i understood now why the smell of laundry soap was so comforting: things couldn't be so hopeless if somebody was still bothering to wash the sheets.

"you ain't ever gonna feel nothin' other people ain't been through a million times before."

"its like anything else, i guess. you've never heard of it, and then once you have you see it everywhere you look." i gave him a doubtful look. "you find what you expect. that's what i'm getting at."

she'd never loved me, had she? she'd felt responsible for me, like everything i'd ever done was her fault for having brought me into the world. every kindness she'd ever shown me had come out of guilt, not love. all that time she was only waiting until i was old enough to get by on my own.

"i guess i just don't see the point of it. all the things they used to tell us in school, how we should read all those books and do all these things to better ourselves. like learning bigger words makes you a better person." "it's not about that." "there's no point. i can't better myself." "but that's not why i read. when i read a book i can be somebody else. for two or three hundred pages i can have the problems of a normal person, even if that person is traveling through time or fighting aliens." i ran my hand over the master and margarita. "i need the books. they're all i've got" he looked at me then like he felt sorry for me.

"musicals are corny." "so what?" i said. "they're the best kind of fantasy all these beautiful people breaking out into song because talking about what they're feeling wouldn't be good enough."

i never thought i'd be jealous of a girl in a mental hospital.

"i told you family's overrated."

"now everything in that room belongs to you."

• 02 — ottessa moshfegh meu ano de descanso e relaxamento
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

eu já gostei da reva, mas não gostava mais. nós erámos amigas desde a faculdade, o que significava tempo suficiente para que a única coisa em comum que nos restasse fosse nossa história juntas.

"pelo menos estou me esforçando para mudar e ir atrás do que eu quero", ela disse. "além de dormir, o que você quer da vida?" escolhi ignorar seu sarcasmo. "queria ser artista, mas não tenho talento", respondi.

eu sempre estava disponível.

caras chatos lendo nietzsche no metrô, proust, david foster wallace, anotando seus pensamentos brilhantes num moleskine preto ... eles se ressentiam do sucesso alheio, queriam ser adorados, influentes celebrados por seu gênio, achavam que mereciam ser alvo de admiração ... esse tipinho se concentrava principalmente no brooklyn, outra razão pela qual eu estava feliz em morar no upper east side. lá ninguém ouvia moldy peaches. lá ninguém dava a mínima para "ironia" ou dogma 95 ou klaus kinki.

desde a adolescência eu oscilava entre querer parecer a branquinha mimada que de fato era e a dublê de mendiga que acho que seria se tivesse coragem.

adormeci no sofá vendo a ladrona. pelo menos whoopi goldberg era um motivo pra continuar viva.

"vai você ser esperta e depois me conta como é ótimo. estarei aqui, hibernando."

pintar o cabelo de roxo, ser reprovada, passar fome, furar o nariz, sair por aí dando pra geral, essas coisas. eu via outras adolescentes fazendo isso, mas na verdade não tinha energia para me dar ao trabalho. queria atenção, mas me recusava a me humilhar pedindo por ela. seria punida se demonstrasse sinais de sofrimento, sabia disso. sendo assim, eu me comportava. fazia tudo certinho. minha revolta era silenciosa, em meus pensamentos. meus pais mal pareciam notar que eu existia.

ainda não conseguia aceitar que trevor fosse um babaca imbecil. não queria acreditar que tinha me degradado por alguém que não merecia. ainda estava presa àquele vestígio de vaidade.

"você viu sexo, mentiras e videotape?", perguntei. "nesse filme, o james spader..."

o mundo da arte acabou se mostrando parecido com o mercado de ações: um reflexo de tendências políticas e convicções do capitalismo movido pela ganância, por fofoca e cocaína.

herdei do meu pai a coleção completa de vhs de jornada nas estrelas: a nova geração. o dia que ele encomendou aqueles cassetes deve ter sido a única ocasião na vida dele que discou para um 0800.

a ideia de como seria meu futuro de repente veio à tona: ele ainda não existia. eu estava criando o futuro ali, parada, respirando, fixando o ar ao redor do meu corpo com calma, tentando captar algo - um pensamento, suponho - como se isso fosse possível, como se eu acreditasse na ilusão descrita naquelas pinturas - que o tempo podia ser contido, mantido em cativeiro. eu não sabia o que era verdade ... o tempo não era imemorial. as coisas eram apenas coisas.

• 03 — jane austen emma
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

o sr. knightley, na verdade, era uma das poucas pessoas que podiam ver defeitos em emma woodhouse, e a única que ousava mencioná-los a ela; e, embora isso não fosse particularmente agradável a emma, ela sabia que o era ainda menos ao pai, já que este nem de leve podia admitir a hipótese de que ela não fosse tida como absolutamente perfeita por todos.

emma está ameaçando ler mais desde quando tinha 12 anos. já vi muitas listas, em várias ocasiões, relacionando os livros que tencionava ler regularmente então: listas bem-elaboradas, livros bem escolhidos, em bela disposição, às vezes em ordem alfabética, às vezes em outra ordem qualquer ... mas cansei-me de esperar que emma se dedicasse seriamente à leitura. ela não é de se submeter a coisa alguma que exija esforço e paciência, e a sujeitar sua fantasia ao puro entendimento.

adoro contemplá-la; e acrescento este louvor: não a acho pessoalmente fútil. considerando o quanto é elegante, parece não se ocupar muito consigo própria; sua vaidade reside em outra coisa.

sempre quis fazer de tudo e conseguiu mais progressos - tanto em desenho quanto em música - do que muitos o teriam conseguido com o pouco esforço com que ela sempre se entregou a isso. desenhava, tocava e cantava em quase todos os estilos; mas sempre lhe faltava perseverança; e em nada se aproximou daquele grau de excelência que bem gostaria de possuir e que não devia ter deixado de alcançar.

ter encantos, harriet, não é o suficiente para me induzir ao casamento; posso achar outras pessoas encantadoras... uma pessoa pelo menos. e não só não pretendo casar-me no presente, como tenho certa intenção de não me casar nunca ... era preciso que eu encontrasse alguém muito superior a todos aqueles que conheci até agora, para me sentir tentada ... não aspiro fortuna; não quero um emprego; não pretendo ser importante; acredito que poucas mulheres casadas sejam tão donas da casa de seus maridos como eu sou da de meu pai; e nunca, nunca poderia esperar ser mais fielmente amada e considerada importante, sempre tida como a primeira e sempre om a razão aos olhos de outro homem, como sou aos dele ... e bem me conheço, harriet, minha mente é muito ativa e laboriosa, com grande independência de recursos; e, além disso, não percebo por que irei ter mais necessidade de emprego aos quarenta ou cinquenta do que aos 21 anos. as ocupações usais da mulher, sejam visuais, manuais ou mentais, estarão abertas para mim como estão agora, ou sem nenhuma variação importa. se eu desenhar menos, lerei mais; se desistir da música, vou bordar tapetes.

arrebentou então o cadarço e atirou-o discretamente numa vala, colocando-se assim na situação de pedir-lhes que passassem e lhe desculpassem sua impossibilidade de prosseguir, já que não podia caminhar até a casa de maneira adequada. - um dos meus cadarços se rompeu - disse ela - e não sei como dar um jeito ...

há pessoas que, quantos mais fizermos por elas, menos farão para si mesmas.

- talvez agora possa começar a lamentar que perdeu um dia inteiro, dos poucos que tem, só para cortar o cabelo.

estou certa de que prefiro ouvi-la em vez dela.

- não é justo - disse emma, num cochicho - eu apenas fiz uma suposição ao acaso. não a constranja.

- é verdade, sinto muito estar com a razão neste caso. gostaria muito mais de ser feliz que ser sensata.

"não há encanto maior que a ternura do coração."

- não sei fazer discursos, emma - ele logo recomeçou, num tom de sincera, inteligível e decidida ternura, tanto quanto podia soar convincente. - se eu a amasse menos, seria capaz de falar mais sobre isto.

- oh! eu sempre mereço o melhor tratamento, porque não tolero nenhum outro ... - você mudou visivelmente desde a última vez que falamos nesse assunto. - espero que sim... pois naquela época eu era uma idiota.

• 04 — ichiro kishimi the courage to be disliked
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

the world you see is different from the one i see, and it's impossible to share your world with anyone else.

you should arrive at answers on your own, not rely upon what you get from someone else.

the greek word for "good" (agathon) does not have a moral meaning. it just means "beneficial." conversely, the word for "evil (kakon) means "not beneficial."

we cannot alter objective facts. but subjective interpretations can be altered as much as one likes.

"in our culture weakness can be quite strong and powerful."

i don't know much about fashion, but i think it's advisable to think of people who wear rings with rubies and emeralds on all their fingers as having issues with feelings of inferiority, rather than issues of aesthetic sensibility. in other words, they have sings of superiority complex.

even if you're not a loser, even if you're someone who keeps on winning, if you are someone who placed himself in competition, you will never have a moment's peace.

if someone were to abuse me to my face, i would think about the person's hidden goal. even if you are not directly abusive, when you feel genuinely angry due to another person's words or behavior, please consider that the person is challening you to a power struggle.

if romantic love is a relationship connected by red string, then the relationship between parents and children is bound in rigid chains. and a pair of small scissors is all you have.

as long as i use etiology to think, it is because he hit me that i have a bad relationship with my father, it would be a matter that was impossible for me to do anything about. but if i can think, i brought out the memory of being hit because i don't want my relationship with my father to get better, then i will be holding the card to repair relations. because if i can just change the goal, that fixes everything.

is pointing the camera at the protagonist really such a reprehensible thing?

because other people are not living to satisfy your expectations ... then, when those expectations are not satisfied, they become deeply desillusioned and feel as if they have been horribly insulted. and they become resentful, and think, that person didn't do anything for me. that person let me down. that person isn't my comrade anymore. he's my enemy.

when that happens, if you are thinking of school as being everything to you, you will end up without a sense of belonging to anything. and then, you will escape within a smaller community, such as your home. you will shut your self in, and maybe even turn to violence against members of your own family ... once you know how big the world is, you will see that all the hardship you went through school was a storm in a teacup. the moment you leave the teacup, but raging storm will be gone, and a gentle breeze will greet you in its place.

they are probably afraid that women will grow wise to their situation and start earning more than men do, and that women will start asserting themselves. they see all interpersonal relations as vertical relationships, and they are afraid of being seen by women as beneath the. that is to say, they have intense, hidden feelings of inferiority.

do not treat it as a line. think of life as a series of dots.

so life in general has no meaning whatsoever. but you can assign meaning to that life. and you are the only one who assign meaning to your life ... as long as we do not lose sight of this compass and keep on moving in this direction, there is happiness.

no, that is not the case. you say you wish you had known this ten years ago. it is because adler's though resonates with you now that you are thinking this. no one knows how you would have felt about it ten years ago. this discussion was something that you needed to hear now.

• 05 — j. g. ballard concrete island
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

'so no one stopped? i suppose you were surprised. these days we don't notice other people's selfishness until we're on the receiving end ourselves.'

you're the sort of man who has to test himself all the time. do you think you crashed on to this traffic island deliberately?

• 06 — antoine de saint exupery the little prince
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

i am very fond of sunsets.

it is more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. if you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.

conceited people never hear anything but praise.

what is essential is invisible to the eye ... it is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important ... but you must not forget it. you become responsible for your rose.

you - you alone - will have the stars as no one else has them.

• 07 — jared diamond guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

this objetction rests on a common tendency to confuse and explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results. what use one makes of a historical explanation is a question separate from the explanation itself. understand is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it.

the americas' big animals had already survived the ends of 22 previous ice ages. why did most of them pick the 23rd to expire in concert, in the presence of all those supposedly harmless humans?

elephants have been tamed, but never domesticated.

all those military histories glorifying great generals oversimplify the ego-deflating truth: the winners of past wars were not always the armies with the best generals and weapons, but were ofren merely those bearing the nastiest germs to transmit to their enemies

thus, invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa.

the new guineans whom i know include potential edisons. but they directed their ingenuity toward technological problems appropriate to their situations: the problems of surviving without any imported items in the new guinea jungle, rather than the problem of inventing phonographs.

• 08 — arthur schopenhauer the art of always being right
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

for example, should he defend suicide, you may at once exclaim, 'why don't you hang yourself?'

paveant illi, ego non pavebo.

they would sooner die than think ... in short, there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?

as a general rule, half an ounce of will is more effective than hundred-weight of insight and intelligence.

• 09 — haruki murakami norwegian wood
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

life doesn't require ideals. it requires standards of action.

if you only read the books that everyone is reading, you can only think what everyone is thinking.

"i'm looking for selfishness. perfect selfishness. like, say i tell you i want to eat strawberry shortbread. adn you stop everything you're doing and run out and buy it for me. and you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortbread out to me. and i say i don't want it any more and throw it out of the window. that's what i'm looking for." "i'm not sure that has anything to do with love," i said with some amazement. "it does," she said.

everybody would use big words and pretend they knew what was going on ... most of these student types are total frauds.

i taught myself french and it's pratically perfect. languages are like games. you learn the rules for one, and they all work the same way. like women.

• 10 — j. d. salinger the catcher in the rye
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

the goddam movies. they can ruin you. i'm not kidding.

the terrible part, though, is that i meant it when i asked her.

• 11 — niccolo machiavelli the prince
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

without an opportunity, their abilities would have been wasted, and without their abilities, the opportunity would have arisen in vain.

men are quicker to forget the death of a father than the loss of a patrimony.

all men will see what you seem to be; only a few will know what you are.

the people, as cicero says, may be ignorant, but they can recognize the truh and will readily yield when some trustworthy man explains it to them.

beside, men are moved by two principal things - by love and by fear.

• 12 — f. scott fitzgerald the great gatsby
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

'i'm glad it's a girl. and i hope she'll be a fool - that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.'

'there are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.'

'how did he happen to do that?' i asked after a minute. 'he just saw the opportunity.'

• 13 — f. scott fitzgerald tender is the night
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

"-so you love me?" "oh, do i!"

"god, am i like the rest after all?" - so he used to think starting awake at night - "am i like the rest?" this was poor material for a socialist but good material for those who do much of the world's rarest work.

you see she's quite musical and speaks all these languages.

you used to say a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he's like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things.

"dick has me," laughed nicole. "i should think that'd be enough mental disorder for one man."

"you were scared, weren't you?" she accused him. "you wanted to live!"

"good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. now, human respect - you don't call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people's feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can't distinguish what should be respected in them."

"i never understood what common sense meant applied to complicated problems - unless it means that a general practitioner can perform a better operation than a specialist."

"but the meaning are different - in french you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. but in english you can't be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too. that gives me an advantage."

nicole had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings.

"i loved dick and i'll never forget him," tommy answered, "of course not - why should you?"

• 14 — franz kafka the metamorphosis
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

era ele um animal, já que a música o comovia tanto? era como se lhe abrisse o caminho para o alimento almejado e desconhecido. estava decidido a chegar até a irmã, puxá-la pela saia e com isso indicar que ela devia ir ao seu quarto com o violino, pois ninguém aqui apreciava sua música como ele desejava fazer.

• 15 — johann wolfgang von goethe the sorrows of young werther
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

most people spend the greatest part of the time struggling to stay alive, and the little bit of freedom they have left makes them so anxious that they'll look for any means to get rid of it.

i think - that there are so few good days and so many bad ones. if our hearts were always open to enjoy the good that god puts before us each day, we would also be estrong enough to endure the bad whenever it comes.

certainly, since we are so constituted as to compare everything with ourselves and ourselves with everything, our happiness or misery lies in the objects with which we are associated, and so there's nothing more dangerous than solitude.

sometimes i cannot understand how someone else can love her, is allowed to love her, when i love her so exclusively, so intensely, so fully, and recognize nothing nor know nor have anything but her!

sometimes i tell myself: your fate is unique; count the other fortunate - no one else has ever been so tormented. - then i read a poet from ancient times, and it seems as if i were looking into my own heart. i have to endure so much! oh, then, can men who lived before me have been so miserable?

• 16 — jane austen pride and prejudice
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

i could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.

my ideas flow so rapidly that i have not time to express them.

your mother will never see you again if you do not marry mr. collins, and i will never see you again if you do.

there are few people whom i really love, and still fewer whom i think well. the more i see of the world, the more i am dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearence of either merit or sense.

till this moment, i never knew myself.

but how little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue, she could easily conjecture.

i am happier than jane; she only smiles, i laugh.

'a man who had felt less, might.'

• 17 — taylor jenkins reid daisy jones & the six
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

i think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. otherwise it's not faith, right?

"daisy, someone who insistis on the perfect conditions to make art isn't an artist. they're an asshole."

i think people that are too similar... they don't mix well. i used to think soulmates were two of the same. i used to think i was supposed to look for somebody that was just like me. i don't believe in soul mates anymore and i'm not looking for anything. but if i did believe in them, i'd believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn't that needed all the things you had. not somebody who's suffering from the same stuff you are.

that's the problem with people who don't have to work for things. they don't know how to work for things.

confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.

but knowing you're good can only take you so far. at some point, you need someone else to see it, too.

which is what we all want from art, isn't it? when someone pins down that feels like it lives inside us? takes a piece of your heart and shows it to you? it's like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.

you can justify anything. if you're narcissistic enought to believe that the universe conspires for and against you - which we all are, deep down - then you can convince yourself you're getting signs about anything and everything.

knowing you did the right thing doesn't mean you're happy about it.

• 18 — taylor jenkins reid the seven husbands of evelyn hugo
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

the world doesn't give things, you take things.

i think the difference between an actress and a star is that the star feels comfortable being the very thing the world wants her to be.

"first, you have to push people's boundaries and not feel bad about it. no one is going to give you anything if you don't ask for it. you tried. you were told no. get over it."

i have to "evelyn hugo" evelyn hugo.

and then i saw breathless. i left the theater, went straight home, called harry cameron and said, "i have an idea. i'm going to paris."

"so that's what you want to do? you want to spend every second of our lives trying to hide what we really do? who we really are?" "it's what everyone in town is doing every day."

never let anyone make you feel ordinary.

"you have given me more than i ever thought i could have in one life."

i smiled, but all i could think about was rita hayworth's famous line. men go to bed with gilda, but wake up with me.

"nobody deserves anything," evelyn says. "it's simply a matter of who's willing to go and take it for themselves."

• 19 — leopold von sacher-masoch venus in furs
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

but you are abut to say, the individual who rebels against the arragements of society is ostracized, branded, stoned. so be it. i am willing to take the risk; my principles are very pagan. i will live my own life as it pleases me. i am willing to do without your hypocritical respect; i prefer to be happy.

"i shall kill myself here before your eyes," i murmured dully. "do what you please," wanda replied with complete indifference. "but let me go to sleep." she yawned aloud. "i am very sleepy."

i love you, only you, and you - you foolish, little man, didn't know that everything was only make-believe and play acting. how hard it often was for me to strike you with the whip, when i would have rather taken your head and covered with kisses. but now we are through with that, aren't we?

"only inordinately fond of pleasure," she replied with a wild sort of humor. "pleasure alone lends value to existence."

the moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped, deserves to be whipped.

• 20 — hermann hesse demian: die geschichte von emil sinclairs jugend
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

most of the things they teach us are no doubt perfectly true and right, but you can see them differently from how teachers do, and they usually make more sense when you do that.

my is story is not for them. it is meant for people who better understand the human heart.

if an animal, or a person, directs his whole attention and will at a particular thing, he attains it. that's all it is. and it's the same with what you're thing. if you look at someone closely enough, you will know more about him than he knows himself.

if you want something from someone, and you look him straight in the eye and he doesn't get uncomfortable at all, then give up! you'll never get what you want from him, never! but that very rarely happens.

i have nothing against honoring and worshipping this god jehovah, not in the least. but i think we should honor everything, and worship everything - the whole world is sacred, not just this artificially partitioned official half!

the way he usually was when he walked and talked with me was only half of him - a demian playing a temporary role, adapting himself to others and going along with things for the sake of politeness.

"fate and character are different names for the same ideia." now i understand what it meant.

"it's so good to know that there's something inside us, and that it knows everything, wants everything, and does everything better than we do!"

i think i like music because it has so little to do with morality. everything else is moral or immoral, and i am looking for something that isn't.

and every religion is beautiful. religion is soul, irrespective of whether you take christian communion or make the pilgrimage to mecca.

"the things we see," pistorius said softly, "are the same things that are in us. there is no reality other than what we have inside us. that is why most people live such unreal lives, because they see external images as reality and never give their own internal world a chance to express itself. you can be happy living like that, but once you know that there is another way, you can no longer choose to follow the path of the many. the path of the many is an easy one, sinclair. ours is hard."

people like us are very lonely, but at least we have each other, and the secret satisfaction of being different, or rebelling, of wanting something out of the ordinary.

everyone who has changed the course of human history, every last one was able to do so only because he was ready for his destiny.

"love cannot ask," she said, "or plead. love must have the strength to reach certainty from within. then one's love is no longer attracted, it attracts. sinclair, your love is drawn to me. if it ever drawns me to it, i wil come. i do'nt want to do anyone a favor, i want to be won."

he had loved and had found himself in the process. most people love only in order to lose themselves.

• 21 — emily bronte wuthering heights
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

'it is for god to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.'

i love him; and that, not because he's handsome, nelly, but because he's more myself than i am. whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

my love for linton i like the foliage in the woods. time will change it, i'm well aware, as winter changes the trees - my love for heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath - a source of little visible delight, but necessary. nelly, i am heathcliff - he's always, always in my mind - not as a pleasure, any more than i am always a pleasure to myself - but, as my own being - so, don't talk of our separation again - it's impracticable.

'if i imagined you really wished me to marry isabella, i'd cut my throat!' 'oh, the evil is that i am not jealous, is it?'

i'll try to break their hearts by breaking my own.

what in the name of all that feels, has he to do with books, when i am dying?

i wish i were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free... and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them! why am i so changed?

you know as well as i do, that for every though she spends of linton, she spends a thousand on me! ... if he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eight years, as i could i a day.

i shouldn't care what you suffered. i care nothing for your sufferings. why shouldn't you suffer? i do! will you forget me - will you be happy when i am in the earth?

i have not broken your heart - you have broken it - and in breaking it, you have broken mine.

catherine earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as i am living! you said i killed you - haunt me, then! ... be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave in this abyss, where i cannot find you! oh, god! it is unutterable! i cannot live without my life! i cannot live without my soul!

i pray every night that i may live after him; because i would rather be miserable than that he should be - that proves i love him better than myself.

i'll believe you are a coward, for yourself, but not a cowardly betrayer of your best friend.

the entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did existe, and that i have lost her!

• 22 — karl marx the communist manifesto
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

free trade. in one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

at this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial burgeois, the petty burgerois.

capital is therefore not only personal; it is social power.

in burgeois society, living labour is but a mens to increase accumulated labour. in communist society, accumulated labour is but means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

communism deprives no man of the power to appropiate the products of society; all that it does is to the deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropiations.

the communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. they have a world to win.

• 23 — karl marx das kapital
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

it is his labour of last week, or last year, that pays for his labout power this week or this year.

it establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with an accumulation of capital. accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, moral degradation, at opposite pole.

over-taxation is not an incident, but rather a principle.

within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of labout are brought about at the cost of the individual laboure; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers: they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the smae proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him durting the labour process to a despotism the more hateful for its meannes; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital.

the loans enable the government to meet extraordinary expenses, without the taxpayers feeling it immediately, but they necessitate as a consequence, increased taxes.

marx thus shows that crises are not caused by mistakes committed by the capitalism, but are, on the contrary, an inevitable result of normal activity of capital.

• 24 — andrei tarkovsky sculpting in time
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

i could never really believe that any artist could work only for himself, if he knew that he was doing would never be needed by anybody.

'i've seen your film four times in the last week. and i didn't go simply to see it, but in order just to spend just a few hours living a real life with real artists and real people... everything that torments me, everything i don't have and that i long for, that makes me indignant, or sick, or suffocates me, everything that gives me a feeling of light and warmth, and everything that destroys me - it's all there in your film, i see it as if in a mirror. for the first time a film has become something real for me, and that's why i go to see, i want to get right inside it, so i can really be alive.'

'there's another kind of language, another form of communication; by means of feeling and images. that is the contact that stops people being separated from each other, that brings down barriers. will, feeling, emotion - these remove obstacles from between people who otherwise stand on opposite sides of a mirror, on opposite sides of a door... the frames of the screen move out, and the world which used to be partitioned off comes into us, becomes something real...'

i am firmly convicted of one thing (not that it can be analysed): that if an author is moved by the landscape chosen, if it brings back memories to him and suggests associations, even subjective ones, then this will in turn affect the audience with particular excitement.

every artist is ruled by his own laws but these are by no means compulsory for anyone else.

and so art, like science, is a means of assimilating the world, an instrument for knowing it in the course of man's journey towards what is called 'absolute truth'.

modern art has taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for its own sake.

moreover, the great function of art is communication, since mutual understanding is a force to unite people, and the spirit of communion is one of the most important aspects of artistic creavity.

i think that one of the saddest aspects of our time is the total destruction in people's awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the beautiful.

the works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. they have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically.

'my job is to speak in living images, not arguments. i must exhibit life full-face not discuss life.' how true! otherwise the artist is imposing his thoughts on his audience. and has anyone said that he is cleverer than the people in the auditorium, the reader with a book in his hands, or the theatre-goer in the stalls? it is simply that the poet thinks in images, with which, unlike the audience, he can express his vision of the world. it is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

for the genius is revealed not in the absolute perfection of a work but in absolute fidelity to himself, in commitment to his own passion.

history is still not time; nor is evolution. they are both consequences. time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul. time and memory merge into each other; they are like the two sides of a medal. it is obvious that without time, memory cannot exist either, but memory is something so complex that no list of all its attributes could define the totality of the impressions through which it affect us. memory is a spiritual concept!

as the train approached panic started in the theatre: people jumped up and ran away. that was the moment when cinema was born; it was not simply a question of technique, or just a new way of reproducing the world. what came into being was a new aesthetic principle. for the first time in the history of arts, in the history of culture, man found the means to take an impression of time.

i think that what a person normally goes to the cinema is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. he goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person's experience - and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer.

but that is the most painful part of creative work: finding the shortest path between what you want to say or express and its ultimate reproduction in the finished image. the struggle for simplicity is the painful search for a form adequate to the truth you have grasped. you long to be able to achieve great things while economising the means.

the striving for perfection leads an artist to make spiritual discoveries, to exert the utmost moral effort. aspiration towards the absolute is the moving force in the development of mankind. for me the idea of realism in art is linked with that force. art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. realism is striving for the truth, and truth is always beautiful. here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

how does time make itself felt in a shot? it becomes tangible when you sense something significant, truthful, going on beyond the events on the screen; when you realize, quite consciously, that what you see in the frame is not limited to its visual depiction, but is a pointer to something stretching out beyond the frame and to infinity; a pointer to life. like the infinity of the image which we talked of earlier, a film is bigger than it is - at least, if it is a real film. and it always turns out to have more thought, more ideas, than were consciously put there by its author. just as life, constantly moving and changing, allows everyone to interpret and feel each separate moment in his own way, so too a real picture, faithfully recording on filme the time which flows on beyond the edges of the frame, lives within time if time lives within it; this two-way process is a determining factor of cinema.

artists are divided into those who create their own inner world, and those who reacreate reality.

problems of technique are child's play; you can learn any of it. but thinking independently, worthily, is not like learning to do something; nor is being an individual.

my idea of the real screen actor is someone capable of accepting whatever rules of the game are put to him, easily and naturally, with no sign of strain; to remain spontaneous in his reactions to any improvised situation.

a book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

why do mass audiences often prefer to watch exotic stories on the screen, things that have nothing to do with their lives? - they feel they know quite enough about their own lives, and that the last thing they want is to see more; and so in the cinema they want to have someone else's experience, and the more exotic it is, and the less like their own, the more desirable and exciting, and, in their eyes, the more instructive.

the viewer feels a need for such vicarious experience in order to make up in part for what himself has lost or missed; he pursues it in a kind of 'search for lost time.'

it is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executer of other people's ideas.

art must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. and the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition to it - otherwise life would become impossible!

the soul years for harmony, and life is full of discordance. the dichotomy is the stimulus for movement, the source at once of our pain and of our hope: confirmation of our spiritual depths and potential.

the greatest of dramas sets out the eternal problem of the man who is of higher moral stature than his peers, but whose actions necessarily affect and are affected by the ignoble real world.

i am convinced that we now find ourselves on the point of destroying another civilization entirely as a result of failing to take account of the spiritual side of the historical process. we don't want to admit to ourselves that many of the misfortunes besetting humanity are the result of our having become unforgivably, culpably, hopelessly materialistic. seeing ourselves as the protagonists of science, and in order to make our scientific objectivily the more convincing, we have split the one, indivisible human process down the middle, thereby realiving a solitary, but clearly visible, spring, which we declare to be the prime cause of everything, and use it not only to explain the mistakes of the past but also to draw up our blueprint for the future.

we all live in the world as we imagine is, as we create it. and so, instead of enjoying its benefits, we are the victims of its defects.

• 25 — f. scott fitzgerald this side of paradise
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

"i don't like girls in the daytime," he said shortly, and then, thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: "but i like you." he cleared his throat. "i like you first and second and third."

it's just that i feel so sad these wonderful nights. i sort of feel they're never coming again, and i'm not really getting all i could out of them.

"i've lost half my personality in a year." "not a bit of it!" scoffed monsignor. "you've lost a great amount of vanity and that's all."

don't let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself; and you don't worry about losing your "personality", as you persist in calling it; at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning, at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as i do, the genial golden warmth of 4 p.m. ... and beware trying to classify people too definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and by pasting a superlicious label on every one you meet you are merely packing a jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with the world.

if he mat any one good - were there any good people left in the world or did they all live in white apartment-houses now?

"any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid."

"not a bit of will - i'm a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires-" "you are not!" she brought one little fist down onto the other. "you're a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination."

"i think," he said and his voice trembled, "that if i lost faith in you i'd lose faith in god."

two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. all others are hers by natural prerogative.

i'm bright, quite selfish, emotional when aroused, fond of admiration.

"beauty and love pass, i know... oh, there's sadness, too. i suppose all great happiness is a little sad. beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-" "beauty means the agony of sacrifice and the end of agony..." "and, amory, we're beautiful, i know. i'm sure god loves us-" "he loves you. you're his most precious possession." "i'm not his, i'm yours. amory, i belong to you. for the first time i regret all the other kisses; now i know how much a kiss can mean."

you know i'm old in some ways - in others - well, i'm just a little girl. i like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness - and i dread responsability. i don't want to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. i want to worry whether my legs will get slick and brown when i swim in the summer.

"i'm not sure it didn't kill it out of the whole world. oh, lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream i might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader - and now even a leonardo da vinci or lorenzo de mdici couldn't be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. life is too huge and complex. the world is so overgrown that it can't lift its own fingers, and i was planning to be such an important finger-"

trouble is i get distracted when i start to write stories - get afraid i'm doing it instead of living - get thinking maybe life is waiting for me in the japanese gardens at the ritz or at atlantic city or on the lower east side.

"yet when i see a happy family it makes me sick at my stomach-" "happy families try to make people feel that way," said tom cynically.

every author ought to write every bok as if here going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

who? i'm too bright for most men, and yet i have to descent to their level and let the patronize my intellect in order to get their attention.

but as amory had loved himself in eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror.

people make money in books and i've found that i can always do the things that people do in books.

youth is like having a big plate of candy. sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. they don't. they just want the fun of eating it all over again. the matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood - she wants to repeat her honeymoon. i don't want to repeat my innocence. i want the pleasure of losing it again.

amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing.

he found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want - not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable.

"you people never make concessions until they've wrung out of you"

they don't think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won't see that if they don't pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we're going round and round in a circle. that - is the great middle class!

"this is the first time in my life i've argued socialism. it's the only panacea i know. i'm restless. my whole generation is restless. i'm sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artists without an income has to sell his talentos to a button manufacturer. even if i had no talents i'd not be content to work ten years, condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man's son an automobile."

"i simply state that i'm a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation - with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. even it, deep in my heart, i thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, i and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. i've thought i was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. one thing i know. if living isn't a seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game."

• 26 — sigmund freud beyond the pleasure principle
  • ⤹ ★☆☆☆☆

when one considers how little we know from other sources about the origins of consciousness, one is bound to give at least some credence to the proposition that 'consciousness arises instead of a memory trace'.

when the traveller sings in the night he may well close his eyes to his anxiety, but it certainly doesn't help him to see things more clearly.

anything that did not happen in the way the person wanted it to happen is oblirated by being subjected to repetition in a different way - which prompts all the various motive forces to appear on the scene and join in for the duration of the repetitions.

• 27 — friedrich nietzsche beyond good and evil
  • ⤹ ★★☆☆☆

supposing that truth is a woman - what the? is there not ground for suspecting that all philosphers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women.

later on, when the young soul, tortured by continual disillusions, finally turns suspiciously against itself - still ardent and savage even in its suspicion and remorse of conscience: how it upbraids itself, how impatiently it tears itself, how it revenges itself for its long self-blinding, as though it had been a voluntary blindness! ... a decade later, and one comprehends that all this was also still - youth!

a man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess at least two things besides: gratitude and purity.

there is an innocence of admiration: it is possessed by him to whom it has not yet to occured that he himself may be admired some day.

sensuality often forces the growth of love too much, so that its root remains weak, and is easily torn up.

it is not enough to possess a talent: one must also have your permission to possess it.

"i am affected, not because you have deceived me, but because i can no longer believe in you."

blessed are the forgetful: for they "get the better" even of their blunders.

every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. the latter perhaps wounds his vanity; but the former wounds his heart, his sympathy, which always says: "ah, why would you also have a hard time of it as i have?"

• 28 — anais nin delta of venus
  • ⤹ ★☆☆☆☆

she was much more like fire than light.

i felt that nothing would happen to me. i felt desperate with this desire to be a woman, to plinge into living. why was i enslaved by this need of being in love fire? where would my life begin? i would enter each studio expecting a miracle which did not take place. it seemes to me that a great current was passing all around me and that i was left out. i would have to find someone who felt as i did. but where? where?

she was expecting someone - every time a door opened, every time she went to a party, to any gathering of people, every time she entered a café, a theatre.

"you have a habit of turning back, starting a walk and turning back. that is very bad. it is the very first of crimes against life. i believe in audacity."

often he quarreled, warred, drank, with a company of ordinary friends, spent evenings with ignorant people. she could not do this. she liked the exceptional, the extraordinary. this separated them. she would have liked to be like him, near everyone, anyone, but she could not. it saddened her.

• 29 — milan kundera the unbearable lightness of being
  • ⤹ ★★★★★

chance and chance alone has a message for us. everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. only chance can speak to us.

and what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? that is why life is always like a sketch. no, sketch is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the ground-work for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

insofar as it is possible to divide people into categories, the surest criterion is the deep-seated desires that orient them to one or another lifelong activity.

since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him.

it's not sensual pleasure i'm after, she would say, it's happiness. and pleasure without happiness is not pleasure.

einmal ist keinmal. what happens once might as well not have happened at all.

- that man acted as though history were a picture rather than a sketch. he acted as though everything he did were to be repeated endlessly, to return eternally, without the slightest doubt about his actions. he was convinced he was right, and for him that was a sign not of narrowmindedness but of virtue.

if excitement is a mechanism our creator uses for his own amusement, love is something that belong to us alone and enables us to flee the creator. love is our freedom. love lies beyond es muss sein!

we can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

perhaps the reason we are unable to love is that we yearn to be loved, that is we demand something (love) from our partner instead or delivering ourselves up to him demand-free and asking for nothing but his company.

human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. that is why man cannot be happy: happines is the longing for repetition.

sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. every year it gets harder to change.

• 30 — marcel proust swann's way
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

but then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.

next to this central belief, which, while i was reading, would be constantly in motion from my inner self to the outer world, towards the discovery of truth, came the emotions aroused in me by the action in which i would be taking part, for these afternoons were crammed with more dramatic and sensational events than occur, often, in a whole lifetime. these were the events which took place in the book i was reading. it is true that the people concerned in them were not what françoise would have called 'real people'. but none of the feeling which the joys or misfortunes of a 'real' person awaken in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplication of it which consisted in the suppresion, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided improvement. a 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not strength to lift. it some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself he is capable of feeling any emotion either.

once we believe that a fellow-creature has a share in some unknown existence to which that creature's love for ourselves can win us admission, that is, of all preliminary conditions which love exacts, the one to which he attaches most importance, the one which makes him generous or indifferent as to the rest.

and when he was tempted to regret that, for months past, he had done nothing but visit odette, he would assure himself that he was not unreasonable in giving up much of his time to the study of an inestimably precious work of art, cast for once in a new, a different, an especially charming metal, in an unmatched exemplar which he would contemplate at one moment with the humple, spiritual, disinterested mind of an artist, at another with the pride, the selfishness, the sensual thrill of a collector.

that the world inhabited by odette was not that other world, fearful and supernatural, in which he spent his time in placing her - and which existed, perhaps, only in his imagination, but the real universe, exhaling no special atmosphere of gloom, comprising that table at which he might sit down, presently, and write, and this drink which he was being permitted, now, to taste.

even when he was not thinking of the little phrase, it existed, latent, in his mind, in the same way as certain other conceptions without material equivalent, such as our notions of light, of sound, of perspective, of bodily desire, the rich possessions wherewith our inner temple is diversified and adorned. perhaps we shall lose them, perhaps they will be oblirated, if we return to nothing in the dust. but so long as we are alive, we can no more bring ourselves to a state inwhich we shall not have known them than we can with regard to any material object, than we can, for example, doubt the luminosity of a lamp that has been lighted, in view of the changed aspect of everything in the room, from which has vanished even the memory of the darkness.

'people don't know when they are happy. they're never so unhappy as they think they are.'

even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries for which we long occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our true life than the country in which we may happen to be. doubtless, if at that time, i had paid more attention to what was in my mind when i pronounced the words 'going to florence, to parma, to pisa, to venice', i should have realized that what i saw was in sense a town, but something as different from anything that i knew, something as delicious as might be for a human race whose whole existence had passed in a series of late winter afternoons, that inconceivable marvel, a morning in spring.

helped me to understand how paradoxical it is to seek in reality the pictures that are stored in one's memory, which would inevitably lose the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being apprehended by the senses. the reality that i had known no longer existed ... none of them ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment.

• 31 — ernest hemingway a moveable feast
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

if you are lucky enough to have lived in paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for paris is a moveable feast.

i'v seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if i never see you again, i thought. you belong to me and paris belongs to me and i belong to this notebook and this pencil.

'do not worry. you have always written before and you will write now. all you have to do is write one true sentecne. write the truest sentence that you know.' so finally i would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. it was easy then because there was always one true sentence that i knew or had seen or had heard someone say.

'creation's probably overrated. after all, god made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.'

• 32 — hermann hesse steppenwolf
  • ⤹ ★★★★☆

"most people have no desire to swin until they are able to. " isn't that a laugh? of course they don't want to swim! after all, they were born to live on dry land, not in water. nor, of course, do they want to think. they weren't made to think, but to live! it's true and anyone who makes thinking his priority may well go far as a thinker, but when all's said and done he has just mistaken water for dry land, and one of these days he'll drown.

'oh,' i confessed, i'm not sure myself now. i went to university, made music, read books, travelled-" "you have strange ideas of what it means to live! so you've always done difficult and complicated things, never once learning how do the simple ones?"

i too once overestimated the value of time; thats why i wanted to live to be a hundred. but, you see, there is no time in eternity. eternity is an instant, just long enough for a prank.

actually, all human beings ought to be mirrors for one another, responding and corresponding to each other in this way, but the thing is that cranks like you are oddities. you easity get led astray, bewitched into thinking that you can no longer see or read anything in the eyes of other people, that there is nothing there that concerns you any more. and when a crank of your sort suddenl discovers a face again that really looks at him, in which he senses something akin to a response and an affinity, it naturally fills him with joy.

life is much shallower, harry, if you are fighting for something good and ideal in the belief that you are bound to achieve it. are ideals necessarily there to be achieved? do we as human beings live only in order to abolish death? no, we live to fear death, then love it again, and it's precisely because of death that the brief candle of our lives burns so beautifully for a while. you are a child, harry.

'because i am like you. because i'm just as lonely as you and just as incapable as you are of loving and taking life, my fellow human beings or myself seriously. there are always a few people like this, as you know, who make the highest possible demands on life and have a hard time coming to terms with the stupidity and coarseness of it.'

life is always terrible. we are not responsible for things, yet we have to answer for them. just by virtue of being born we are guilty.

• 33 — lewis carroll alice's adventures in wonderland
  • ⤹ ★★★☆☆

"who are you?" said the caterpillar. alice replied, rather shyly, "i - i hardly know, sir, just at present - at least i know who i was when i got up this morning, but i think i must have changed severeal times since then." "what do you mean by that?" said the caterpillar, sternly. "explain yourself!" "i can't explain myself, i'm afraid, sir," said alice, "because i'm not myself you see - being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing."