Life is short… I like to pay attention while I’m going through it
Viggo Mortensen
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed…And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
David Foster Wallace
“One main idea behind my work is the belief that everything is constantly changing but photography can preserve the moment. Beauty is almost nothing without the knowledge of how fast it will fade…” Carsten Witte
Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human. Not one single truth has ever been arrived at without people first having talked a dozen reams of nonsense.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime And Punishment
As long as I can remember, when I was a little kid I have always been conscious that we are here for a limited period. Not really fearing death at all, but as a little boy I did resent it. I thought it was unfair because there are so many things to do and adventures to have. And as an adult you realise you can never read all the good books. You can’t even see all the good plays or movies or travel to all the places you want to see. It’s impossible. I don’t resent my mortality any more; I’m just conscious of it. Life is short and there’s a fine line, you know. You can be too frantic and desperate, but you can also be too lazy.
Viggo Mortensen
Who is Achilles without his tendon? Who is Samson without Delilah? Who is Oedipus without his clubfoot? … The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles - preferably of his own making - in order to triumph.
Garth Stein, The Art Of Racing In The Rain
Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever.
Jeffrey Eugenides
We only write about two feelings: one is the first day of summer when you and all of your friends are standing on the edge of a cliff watching the sun set and being overcome with all of your hopes and dreams at once. The other is when you’re walking alone in the rain and realize you will be alone forever.
The Drums
(via panthershark)
| Sam: | But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something. |
| Frodo: | What are we holding onto, Sam? |
| Sam: | That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo... and it's worth fighting for. |
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
