@soracities

Nothing can touch them, nothing can possibly end at the height of summer and, like those mirages that tremble on the horizon, there hovers a feeling of imaginable eternity – a serene happiness.
Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Animalia (trans. Frank Wynne)

Night, and everything so quiet, as if there were no one, not even myself.
John Banville, The Sea

the first kiss cuts the deepest

finally made a playlist for that quiet but intense eat me down to the marrow want you in my bloodstream kinda love. enjoy!

Question:

i read your name as socrates at first because I'm blind and i want to apologize

Answer:

in this house we keep it funky and fresh and respect the dialectic so i think old socky would be proud, don’t worry ✌

Question:

Hi- you may get many asks like this, but I just wanted to let you know that your blog has been something I turn to in moments of uncertainty and pain. Thank you so much for what you do here; it has rlly had an impact.

Answer:

this warms my heart so much, anon, you have no idea. i hope you are safe and well in your little corner of the world ♡

Question:

Have you been well?

Answer:

i have, thank you lovely x

I do not want to be alone like this. Why have you not come back to haunt me? It is the least I would have expected of you. Why this silence day after day, night after interminable night? It is like a fog, this silence of yours. First it was a blur on the horizon, the next minute we were in the midst of it, purblind and stumbling, clinging to each other…Send back your ghost. Torment me, if you like. Rattle your chains, drag your cerements across the floor, keen like a banshee, anything. I would have a ghost.
John Banville, The Sea

skullofjoy :

Graham Dean

Well now it’s summer I thought,
so let me do something new.
Sujata Bhatt, from “Baltimore”, Collected Poems

Nothing is so rare as to see misfortune fairly portrayed; the tendency is either to treat the unfortunate person as though catastrophe were his natural vocation, or to ignore the effects of misfortune on the soul, to  assume, that is, that the soul can suffer and remain unmarked by it, can fail, in fact, to be recast in misfortune’s image.
Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (trans. Mary McCarthy)

John Banville, The Sea

[Text ID: “ ‘Don’t look so worried,’ she said. ‘I hated you, too, a little. We were human beings, after all.’ “]

In order to feel true gratitude (the case of friendship being set aside), I have to think that it is not out of pity, sympathy or caprice that I am being treated well, it is not as a favour or privilege, nor as a natural result of temperament, but from a desire to do what justice demands. Accordingly he who treats me thus wishes that all who are in my situation may be treated in the same way by all who are in his own.
Simone Weil, “Love” (trans. Emma Craufurd), Simone Weil: An Anthology

Ben Webster and John Coltrane, 1960. ph. Roy DeCarava

“He did not know whether or not there were atheists in foxholes; he believed now there must have been many in field hospitals, and in the naval hospitals afterward, and in the hospital he had come home from long ago. In Korea and Vietnam, it was [his wife] he prayed to, if turning in fear and loneliness to someone was prayer. Certainly it was hope.”

— Andre Dubus, “The Colonel’s Wife” (for Nicole), Dancing After Hours

artsdrug:

doubledumbass:

how to with john wilson (2020)

Anything is justified in art, but everything must be related. There is nothing that the painter need be forbidden to do. Nothing at all. But when he has finished, what he has done must be judged in relation to the always different and always present struggle of men to realize their potentiality more fully.
John Berger, A Painter of Our Time

Walt Whitman, “The Last Invocation”, Leaves of Grass

[Text ID: “(Strong is you hold O mortal flesh,
Strong is your hold O love.)”]

How I focused on your shirt, your emphatic hands. / How I listened to you with snow falling, with snow / covering all the tired hoof-prints in my soul / I can not explain.
Sujata Bhatt, from “Another Day in Iowa City”, Point No Point: Selected Poems

filmaticbby :

Before Sunrise (1995) dir. Richard Linklater

I feel / the pull of dirt / again, sense mist uncurling / to reveal / no architecture hidden behind the world / except the stories that we make unfolding.
Peter Campion, from “Dandelions”

a-quiet-green-agreement:

For there is no doubt that her swirling hair murmured like underground fountains, sighed like the breeze whispering through leaves.

– María Luisa Bombal, from “Braids,” New Islands and Other Stories (Cornell University Press, 1988)

Most of my books [my mother] didn’t read. Either because they dealt with subjects which were alien to her or because — under the protective influence of my father — she believed they might upset her. Why suffer surprise from something which, left unopened, gives you pleasure? My being a writer was unqualified for her by what I wrote. To be a writer was to be able to see to the horizon where, anyway, nothing is ever very distinct and all questions are open. Literature had little to do with the writer’s vocation as she saw it. It was only a by-product. A writer was a person familiar with the secrets.
John Berger, from “Mother”, Selected Essays

Ariel Dorfman, excerpt from Missing (from “The Hour of Poetry”, John Berger)

[Text ID: “If he were dead
I’d know it.
Don’t ask me how.
I’d know.

I have no proof,
no clues, no answer, nothing that proves
or disproves.

There’s the sky,
the same blue
it always was.

But that’s no proof.
Atrocities go on
and the sky never changes.]

The sea-tangle was drifting below him and the grey warm air was still and a new wild life was singing in his veins.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

weirdlandtv:

WINTER GHOSTS by Sean Fitzgerald.

“He’s my editor. The first person who reads my work. He’s the friend who knows the self that I put in my novels better than anyone else.”

Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police (tr. Stephen Snyder)

For Sabina, living in truth, lying neither to ourselves nor to others, was possible only away from the public: the moment someone keeps an eye on what we do, we involuntarily make allowances for that eye, and nothing we do is truthful. Having a public, keeping a public in mind, means living in lies. Sabina despised literature in which people give away all kinds of inti­mate secrets about themselves and their friends. A  man who loses his privacy loses everything, Sabina thought. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (trans. Michael Henry Heim)

appalachianred :

Setty Abraham from Baghdad and Mack Coad from Alabama pose for a picture together during the Spanish Civil War. Both were antifascist fighters in the International Brigades who traveled to fight the forces under Franco. 

Setty Abraham was a typographer, interpreter, and writer born in Baghdad and was working in South America before the war.

Mack Coad was a steelworker from Birmingham and Communist Party organizer. He is mentioned in books such as “Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression” and Harry Haywood’s autobiography “Black Bolshevik”.

Sujata Bhatt, from “Truth is Mute″, Poppies in Translation

[Text ID: “love will be silent with love.”]