There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears…they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.
— Aldous Huxley (1962)
Tama Art University Library- Japan
Tama Art University Library
Words and a book and a belief that the world is words…
— David Foster Wallace; The Broom of the System (via wordpainting)
A page of Vincent van Gogh’s sketchbook
Ah!” she said, lifting her lovely tear-bright eyes to the ceiling. “If you knew all the dreams I’ve dreamed!
I realized that you had no power over me, that it was not you alone who were my lover but the entire earth. It was as if my soul had extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving simultaneously Niagara Falls thundering far beyond the ocean and the long golden drops rustling and pattering in the lane.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Sounds, from The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (via bookmania)
SC034 by Andreea Badragan on Flickr.
- bed + window + bookshelves = LOVE (by hildagrahnat)
monachopsis
n. the subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your society as a seal on the beach—lumbering, clumsy, resting often, easily distracted, huddled in the presence of other misfits—unable to recognize the nearby ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.
(Source: dictionaryofobscuresorrows)
It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. ‘I am watching you—are you watching yourself in me?’ Most travelers hurry too much…the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly—but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling … you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you’ll be there.
— Lawrence Durrell, from Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel (thank you, A Poet Reflects)
Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit — in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.
— Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah (via myimaginarybrooklyn)
sahaf by nilgun erzik on Flickr.
