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"I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great feat of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary."
- Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) -
"Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets."
- Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness) -
"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?"
- David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas -
"We want to show him how he may get upsides with life. As I said, either friends or the country, some” - she hesitated - “either some very dear person or some very dear place seems necessary to relieve life’s daily grey, and to show that it is grey. If possible, one should have both."
- E.M. Forster, Howards End -
"Looking back on the past six months, Margaret realized the chaotic nature of our daily life, and its difference from the orderly sequence that has been fabricated by historians. Actual life is full of false clues and sign-posts that lead nowhere. With infinite effort we nerve ourselves for a crisis that never comes. The most successful career must show a waste of strength that might have removed mountains, and the most unsuccessful is not that of the man who is taken unprepared, but of him who has prepared and is never taken. On a tragedy of that kind our national morality is duly silent. It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are better for staggering through life fully armed. The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty."
- E.M. Forster, Howards End -
"They merely observed in passing that there was no such thing as splendour or heroism in the world."
- E.M. Forster, Howards End -
" “It is typical of Oxford,” I said, “to start the new year in autumn.”
Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, like those of a foreign village seen from the slopes outside; new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year’s memories."- Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh (via whizzbees)(Source: serazienne, via meiringens)
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"I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W.
I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father’s house this evening or never.
"- Jane Austen, from Persuasion (via colporteur)(Source: aubade, via colporteur)
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"Such were Elizabeth Elliot’s sentiments and sensations; such the cases to alloy, the agitations to vary, the sameness and the elegance, the prosperity and the nothingness, of her scene of life, such the feelings to give interest to a long, uneventful residence in one country circle, to fill the vacancies which there were no habits of utility abroad, no talents or accomplishments for home, to occupy."
- Jane Austen (Persuasion)
lungs
Inês. I am the combined effort of everyone I have ever met.
