Alain de Botton
It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things. — Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness (Pantheon; First Edition, October 3, 2006)
Category: History
Rebecca Solnit
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the… Continue reading Rebecca Solnit
Albert Camus
If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them … they could perceive what they have made of us. — Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951-1959, trans. Ryan Bloom (Ivan R. Dee, 2008)
Alejandra Pizarnik
Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd… Continue reading Alejandra Pizarnik
Primo Levi
I will tell just one more story, the most secret, and I will tell it with the humility and restraint of him who knows from the start that his theme is desperate, his means feeble, and the trade of clothing facts in words is bound by its very nature to fail. It is again among… Continue reading Primo Levi
Harry Crews
It has always seemed to me that I was not so much born into this life as I awakened to it. — Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. (University of Georgia Press October 1, 1995) Originally published 1978.
Isabelle Eberhardt
Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere. ― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt. (Interlink Pub Group; Trade Paperback Edition edition May 1, 2003) Originally published 1987.
Beryl Markham
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm, and these are not the same. There is the… Continue reading Beryl Markham
Simon Van Booy
Loneliness is like being the only person left alive in the universe, except that everyone else is still here. — Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After. (Harper Perennial; Original edition July 5, 2011)
François-René de Chateaubriand
Life is spent hovering round our tomb. Our various sicknesses are but the winds which carry us more or less near to the haven. … Death is our friend, nevertheless we do not recognise it as such, because it presents itself to us under a mask, and that mask inspires us with terror. — François-René… Continue reading François-René de Chateaubriand
The Vale of Soul-Making 