December 2010
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Aubade* by Philip Larkin
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what’s really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The...
November 2010
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“Lies and half-truths fall like snow, covering the things that I remember, the...”
– Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman (read it here)
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“You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather...”
– Marilynne Robinson, interviewed in The Paris Review (via crashinglybeautiful)
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“The day she visited the dissecting room
They had four men laid out, black as...”
– Two Views of a Cadaver Room, Sylvia Plath (via aplathaday)
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“And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick....”
– from Death of a Moth by Annie Dillard (read it here)
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“The faces appeared alongside this swooning feeling, lips on her neck being a...”
– Susan Minot, from the novel Evening (via lotusohm)
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“It was no good doing it in secret; it had to be done in front of everybody else....”
– Ted Hughes, The Paris Review, The Art of Poetry No. 71 (via youveescaped)
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British guys reading out loud from classic novels. →
theepitomeofquiet:
“It is not within the bounds of possibility that we should be in quite the same...”
– Katherine Mansfield, to husband John Middleton Murry in 1920 (via katherine-mansfield)
Go to Google Images. Type in your tumblr URL....
azspot:
(via gilmoure, thisisgallifrey, north-northwest, theta-sigma, oldheadlights, -thejesssett, kehenedybuhrock, melle-amour, yourestupid-, ignitetheairwaves-, low-sodium-freaks, mishaballins)
Mine was a picture of James Joyce!
theepitomeofquiet:
Y’all need to make yourself some tea/coffee/hot chocolate and watch Dominic West read ‘Something Childish But Very Natural’ by Katherine Mansfield over here.
And by the by, if you haven’t read Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ go ahead and pick it up. Katherine Mansfield was the only other writer Virginia Woolf was jealous of, with good reason.
This is really great!...
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“I wished it could always be like this, no people, no city, just rising sun and...”
– Janet Fitch, White Oleander (via wearebasiclight)
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“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her...”
– Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (via aperfectcommotion)
“Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.”
– Saul Bellow, Herzog (via aperfectcommotion)
“The cost of oblivious daydreaming was always this moment of return, the...”
– Atonement (via intothewordless)
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Virginia Woolf Named One of Time Magazine's 25... →
Novelist and critic Virginia Woolf was a pioneer of modernist literature whose work shed light on the oppressed position of women in early 20th century social and political hierarchies. In works such as To the Lighthouse, Orlando and her landmark feminist essay A Room of One’s Own, Woolf used her pen to explore the artistic, sexual and religious roles that women held at this monumental time...
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“It is all Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like...”
– Lesbos, Sylvia Plath (via aplathaday)
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ephemerals:
“This was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, overintimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. It was a need that had the body in it, hands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirt, even if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she...
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“At the beginning of November Plath went flat hunting in London with Hughes. They...”
– Yehuda Koren & Eliat Negev, A Lover of Unreason (Chapter 11: Leaving Plath)
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“Still the room kept for her the ghost of its early strangeness; it would never...”
– elizabeth bowen, to the north (1932), p.180. (via modernistwomen)
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“Life is so ridiculously gorgeous, strange, heartbreaking, horrific, etc., that...”
– Miranda July (via crashinglybeautiful)
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David Foster Wallace's Personal Files: a tour... →
sometimesagreatnotion:
…His class materials take up a couple of boxes in the Ransom archive, providing readers with the opportunity to see which essays and stories Wallace assigned, and then read the professor’s own marked copies of the works. You can see the lines of Lorrie Moore’s short story “People Like That Are the Only People Here” that Wallace thought were either funny or “bad”—as well as...
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Last Words by Sylvia Plath
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already—the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was...
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“People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading...”
– Harold Bloom (via libraryland)
redlipsinkships-deactivated2012 asked: I adore your theme. Where could I download it. Could you please post a link
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“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything....”
– Aldous Huxley (from Brave New World)
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“He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever...”
– Thomas Wolfe in Look Homeward, Angel (1929)
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“The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes...”
– Aldous Huxley in The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
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“My future is blanked with you … I want to wind everything up, sell everything I...”
– Assia Wevill.
Letter written to Ted Hughes 22nd January 1964 (I’m unsure as to whether it was sent or not) regarding rumours of his affair with Susan Alliston.
[A/N: I know I may face criticism posting/reblogging such information as this sometimes at the risk they eclipse the poetry Hughes has... 