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“Read, read, read. Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.”

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Phantom of A Prose
"Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?"

Franz Kafka, letter to Felice Bauer. 

Damn.

(via basedsushigoat)


I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Pablo Neruda

Posted 10 months ago with 1 note
"You get born and you try this and you don’t know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can’t matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it’s all over."
William Faulkner. This man’s starting to grow on me.

Posted 1 year ago
Just a retweet from Thomas Horn. I’m counting on Asa Butterfield next. Oh yes, that would be sweet.

Just a retweet from Thomas Horn. I’m counting on Asa Butterfield next. Oh yes, that would be sweet.

Posted 1 year ago with 5 notes
smizingclaude said: Expelliarmus

Protego

Posted 1 year ago
Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris

Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris

"You do look, my son, in a moved sort, as if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir. Our revels new are ended. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
Recently, I did an awful lot of a downloading to catch up on the latest movies ‘til I stumbled upon a quote which, I discovered, was actually from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Not a fan of him myself but I got this from the film My Week With Marilyn, quoted by Sir Laurence Olivier.

Posted 1 year ago
My recently discovered gem; Asa Butterfield

My recently discovered gem; Asa Butterfield

So I just finished reading Leo Tolstoy’s novel called Anna Karenina and assuming a position of a critic, here’s what I think. First, it’s brimming with psychological shiznit such as cognitive dissonance (which, by the way, I just happened to understand through research) that only then when I understood what that means did I start becoming less surprised at how Tolstoy describes an emotion so precisely and perfectly put on words! That’s when I gave psychology more credit than pedantic Mr. Tolstoy here. Meticulous when it comes to minute details that it frustrates me to continue reading without fully grasping what the former phrases mean! I’m a firm believer of allegory and analytical whatnots contained in literary pieces that somehow, failing to understand one part makes me agitated and confused that already it makes me want to give up reading…! However, sometimes, you only begin to understand a portion when you’ve finish the whole sentence, or, say, paragraph. It completes the whole set-up.  Inception. That’s how I describe how he writes. Kind of actually feels like he writes what he thinks, or how he thinks; basing on his paragraph, (which is somehow sometimes consisting only of a sentence with rather multiple clauses, (as with classic writers)) lol see I just did a rough imitation of how he writes! Only he doesn’t use parentheses. Ah, you’ll see! Kidding aside, reading him is a kind of reading one’s mind because you could see how he puts all what one can think about in a single blow of a sentence! Am I making sense? After a day’s reading of Tolstoy, I can’t imagine how tired I always felt. Simply put, it’s one hell of a mental stretch chapter by chapter. To go with this, I actually felt like he’s changing the way I think day by day.  Tolstoy makes one heck of a boring life interesting by the way he writes and describes. So lush and explicit! This is one of the reasons why I was so engaged, albeit its being an 800-paged novel. There’s, however, this, I think, unnecessary and dragging discussions about farming and politics but just as it is not wholly a love story or a personal story, so shall I accept that maybe he’s just trying to relay something which was then probably intriguing and applicable. I mean you have to understand, my mind is pretty much accustomed to 21st century issues. I have right to admit that 19th century topics bore me, right? There’s this bit from the Internet I’ve read that “Anna Karenina is an example of literary fiction because it focuses more on style and psychological depth than on plot.” True enough, it’s not some page-turner sort of novel that fulfills the diversion of a reader - say, some ninja or vampiric scenes come up for the reader’s entertainment appetite. That’s not how Tolstoy rolls. But after all, look at how high the pedestal is where the book and Tolstoy soars! I got a bit panicky in the end, thanks to my sluggish mental capacity, when Tolstoy has gotten a bit too spiritual and too symbolic for me that I cannot quite fathom anymore what he’s trying to say! Not to mention that there were only a couple of pages left and I’m starting to doubt if it’s enough to explain the complete confusion that my mind was presently in. There was a point, really, in those fidgety minutes when I started asking myself quite desperately if I’ve really understood the whole book (the lengthy that it was!) but nonsense rubbish, if I didn’t comprehend one part at first, doesn’t necessarily mean i don’t the whole. I have first gotten hold of a copy of this book during one of my slaphappy strolls in my school library. From then on, I couldn’t stop reading it and I soon made a point to buy my own copy. Can’t deny though, that one of my motivations was that it’s a Tolstoy. I mean, I’m reading THE Tolstoy.  (I linked an analysis of the book in the picture if reading more about it suits your fancy.)

So I just finished reading Leo Tolstoy’s novel called Anna Karenina and assuming a position of a critic, here’s what I think.

First, it’s brimming with psychological shiznit such as cognitive dissonance (which, by the way, I just happened to understand through research) that only then when I understood what that means did I start becoming less surprised at how Tolstoy describes an emotion so precisely and perfectly put on words! That’s when I gave psychology more credit than pedantic Mr. Tolstoy here.

Meticulous when it comes to minute details that it frustrates me to continue reading without fully grasping what the former phrases mean! I’m a firm believer of allegory and analytical whatnots contained in literary pieces that somehow, failing to understand one part makes me agitated and confused that already it makes me want to give up reading…! However, sometimes, you only begin to understand a portion when you’ve finish the whole sentence, or, say, paragraph. It completes the whole set-up. 

Inception. That’s how I describe how he writes. Kind of actually feels like he writes what he thinks, or how he thinks; basing on his paragraph, (which is somehow sometimes consisting only of a sentence with rather multiple clauses, (as with classic writers)) lol see I just did a rough imitation of how he writes! Only he doesn’t use parentheses. Ah, you’ll see! Kidding aside, reading him is a kind of reading one’s mind because you could see how he puts all what one can think about in a single blow of a sentence! Am I making sense?

After a day’s reading of Tolstoy, I can’t imagine how tired I always felt. Simply put, it’s one hell of a mental stretch chapter by chapter. To go with this, I actually felt like he’s changing the way I think day by day. 

Tolstoy makes one heck of a boring life interesting by the way he writes and describes. So lush and explicit! This is one of the reasons why I was so engaged, albeit its being an 800-paged novel.

There’s, however, this, I think, unnecessary and dragging discussions about farming and politics but just as it is not wholly a love story or a personal story, so shall I accept that maybe he’s just trying to relay something which was then probably intriguing and applicable. I mean you have to understand, my mind is pretty much accustomed to 21st century issues. I have right to admit that 19th century topics bore me, right?

There’s this bit from the Internet I’ve read that “Anna Karenina is an example of literary fiction because it focuses more on style and psychological depth than on plot.” True enough, it’s not some page-turner sort of novel that fulfills the diversion of a reader - say, some ninja or vampiric scenes come up for the reader’s entertainment appetite. That’s not how Tolstoy rolls. But after all, look at how high the pedestal is where the book and Tolstoy soars!

I got a bit panicky in the end, thanks to my sluggish mental capacity, when Tolstoy has gotten a bit too spiritual and too symbolic for me that I cannot quite fathom anymore what he’s trying to say! Not to mention that there were only a couple of pages left and I’m starting to doubt if it’s enough to explain the complete confusion that my mind was presently in. There was a point, really, in those fidgety minutes when I started asking myself quite desperately if I’ve really understood the whole book (the lengthy that it was!) but nonsense rubbish, if I didn’t comprehend one part at first, doesn’t necessarily mean i don’t the whole.

I have first gotten hold of a copy of this book during one of my slaphappy strolls in my school library. From then on, I couldn’t stop reading it and I soon made a point to buy my own copy. Can’t deny though, that one of my motivations was that it’s a Tolstoy. I mean, I’m reading THE Tolstoy. 

(I linked an analysis of the book in the picture if reading more about it suits your fancy.)

Posted 1 year ago with 1 note
"Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present… the name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in - its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present."
Paul, on Midnight in Paris (2011)

Posted 1 year ago with 4 notes