( via / via )

I confess i’m in entire sympathy with Delany (one of my favorite writers) but i don’t agree with the one-size-fits-all reading list. Reading is, before anything else, nutrition. Therefore what i advocate—& not only for those who “want to become writers” (what a ridiculous aspiration)—is simply to read 500 books, half of them written before you were born.

"I Know This World is Not My Home

"The frenzy of the lilacs strikes
against my old man’s heart, and yet
I know this world is not my home,
where I have hidden for so long
with pain alone to pay my pains.
I know this world
is not my home, where greenness trills
its singing to the chasing clouds
that I have chased and not once caught.
I know this world
is not my home, whose fragrance fills me
and whose kind breath’s movement makes
what I cannot choose to unchoose.
I know this world. I know this world
is not my home."

—Alex Rettie via

"The entire crushing immensity was unconscious of itself, and the negligible thing on the floorboards was holding all of it inside a skull the size of a cantaloupe."

"Men respond only faintly to the horrors that take place around them, except at moments, when the savage, crying incongruity and ghastliness of our condition suddenly reveals itself vivid before our eyes, and we are forced to know what we are. Then the ground slides away from under our feet. But not for long." —Shestov

A language in which there is no word for 'I' (& other word-mysteries). More, just lately.