Afterthoughts of another Afterworld

Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Visibility, Exactitude

Most men are followers, and implicitly rely upon the judgment of others. They mistake solemnity for wisdom, and regard a grave countenance as the title page and Preface to a most learned volume. So they are easily imposed upon by forms, strange garments, and solemn ceremonies. And when the teaching of parents, the customs of neighbors, and the general tongue approve and justify a belief or creed, no matter how absurd, it is hard even for the strongest to hold the citadel of his soul.

—Robert G. Ingersoll, The Great Infidels (via liberumarbitriumindifferentiae)

semperaugustus:

“Each writer/reader, pausing on the page before the poem begins, is a roar of mundanities. But then the words themselves, figured into syntax and line, bring quiet to the world.”

—Heather McHugh, from “Tiny Étude on the Poetic Line”

(Source: proustitute)

hypna: Life of Grass by Mathilde Roussel Organic sculptures made of soil and wheat grass seeds.

hypna:

Life of Grass by Mathilde Roussel

Organic sculptures made of soil and wheat grass seeds.

(via loveyourchaos)

Don’t worry about saving these songs! And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn’t matter. We have fallen into the place where everything is music.

—Rumi (via evoketheforms)

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other’s way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night,
But in the shameful day.

—Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (via liberumarbitriumindifferentiae)

Best Author-on-Author Insults in History

  • Virginia Woolf on James Joyce: [Ulysses is] the work of a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples.
  • Harold Bloom on J.K. Rowling: How to read ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’? Why, very quickly, to begin with, and perhaps also to make an end. Why read it? Presumably, if you cannot be persuaded to read anything better, Rowling will have to do.
  • H. G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw: An idiot child screaming in a hospital.
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen: Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.
  • William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway: He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
  • Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner: Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?
  • W. H. Auden on Robert Browning: I don’t think Robert Browning was very good in bed. His wife probably didn’t care for him very much. He snored and had fantasies about twelve-year-old girls.
  • Mark Twain on Jane Austen: Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.

—Virginia Woolf, The Years (via afortressaroundmyheart)

(via margaretokeefe)

INSIDE VOICES, PLEASE.: favorite quote of the day:

margaretokeefe:

Literary critic Harold Bloom on King Lear:

“Are Shakespeare’s perspectives in Lear incurably male? The only woman in the play who is not a fiend is Cordelia, whom some recent feminist critics see as Lear’s own victim, a child he seeks to enclose as much at the end as at the beginning. Such a…