The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.

   Karen von Blixen-Finecke, “Seven Gothic Tales,” 1934
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06.02.12 /01:48/♥ 9

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

   David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
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05.26.12 /02:26/♥ 2

In those slow, empty hours a sense of the sadness of all existence rises from my soul to my mind, the bitter sense that everything is at once both felt by me and external to me, and that I am powerless to change it.

   Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, p. 23
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04.26.12 /15:48/♥ 5

The mathematician teaches me to count, and adapts my fingers to avarice; but I should prefer him to teach me that there is no point in such calculations, and that one is none the happier for tiring out the book-keepers with his possessions. What use is it to be able to divide a piece of land into equal areas if I’m unable to divide it with a brother?

   Seneca, Letters From a Stoic, Epistle LXXXVIII
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04.25.12 /21:45/♥ 1

Now I see. The word was timshel.”
“Timshel—and you said—”
“I said that word carried a man’s greatness if he wanted to take advantage of it.”
“It set him free,” said Lee. “It gave him the right to be a man, separate from every other man.”
“That’s lonely.”
“All great and precious things are lonely.

   East of Eden, p. 519
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04.22.12 /23:33/♥ 26

It’s better to be kind than to be right.

   Anne Lamott
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04.15.12 /00:27/♥ 7

If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital.

   John Irving
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04.11.12 /21:28/♥ 15

In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony.

   Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
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04.11.12 /02:26/♥ 9
Canvas  by  andbamnan