i shut my eyes and all the world drops dead

( + )

Yossarian decided to change the subject. 'Now you're changing the subject,' he pointed out diplomatically. 'I'll bet I can name two things to be miserable about for every one you can name to be thankful for.'

'Be thankful you've got me,' she insisted.

'I am, honey. But I'm also goddam good and miserable that I can't have Dori Duz again, too. Or the hundreds of other girls and women I'll see and want in my short lifetime and won't be able to go to bed with even once.'

'Be thankful you're healthy.'

'Be bitter you're not going to stay that way.'

'Be glad you're even alive.'

'Be furious you're going to die.'

'Things could be much worse,' she cried.

'They could be one hell of a lot better,' he answered heatedly.

'You're naming only one thing,' she protested. 'You said you could name two.'

'And don't tell me God works in mysterious ways,' Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. 'There's nothing so mysterious about it. He's not working at all. He's playing. Or else He's forgotten all about us. That's the kind of God you people talk about -- a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?'

( more )

[...]

When you asked me if I was an island, I told you that I was not. When you asked me to join you in the drawing room, I told you that I could not, that I was in fact an island and I couldn't join anyone anywhere.

Saddened, you revealed to me that you were not the two things that jut outward into the sea as I had assumed, but the little bit of gray sea between them.

Then I told you I was the entire Arctic Ocean sometimes.

Zachary Schomburg, from The Man Suit

Ok so I am back for a longer post this time :) Basically just a bunch a photos!
( Life )

She was learning the value of boredom. She was clearing out her mind. She had always know that her body was just a shell she lived in, but it occurred to her now that her mind was yet another shell- in which case, who was 'she'? She was clearing out her mind to see what was left. Maybe there would be nothing.


"When my first wife was dying," he told Delia one afternoon, "I used to sit by her bed and I though, This is her true face. It was all hollowed and sharpened. In her youth she'd been very pretty, but now I saw that her younger face had been just a kind of rough draft. Old age was the completed form, the final, finished version she'd been aiming at from the start. The real thing at last! I thought, and I can't tell you how that notion colored things for me from then on. Attractive young people I saw in the street looked so... temporary. I asked myself why they bothered dolling up. Didn't they understand where they were headed? But nobody ever does, it seems. All those years when I was a child longing for it to be 'my turn,' it hadn't ever occured to me that my turn would be over by and by..."

-Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler

http://www.asofterworld.com/iblamethesea/index.php?id=104

buy this as a print I was moving my cameras from one box to another a couple of weeks ago, and found a mystery roll of film. It'd been sitting in this box for who knows how long, so I didn't have high hopes for the photos. HOWEVER when I got them developed, it turned out that they were from early 2005, when I lived in Victoria. This is the lobby of my old apartment building, which was remarkably Bond-villain-lair-like, with leather couches and rough rocky pillars and a psychedelic patterned carpet. Miss you (sort of?), Nottingham Court!

“No time to grieve for roses when the forests are burning.” -Juliusz Słowacki

The forests were on fire —
they however
wreathed their necks with their hands
like bouquets of roses

People ran to the shelters—
he said his wife had hair
in whose depths one could hide

Covered by one blanket
they whispered shameless words
the litany of those who love

When it got very bad
they leapt into each other’s eyes
and shut them firmly

So firmly they did not feel the flames
when they came up to the eyelashes

To the end they were brave
To the end they were faithful
To the end they were similar
like two drops
struck at the edge of a face