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There are two races on earth. Those who need others, who are distracted, occupied and refreshed by others, who are worried, exhausted and unnerved by solitude as by the ascension of a terrible glacier or the crossing of a desert; and those, on the other hand, who are wearied, bored, embarrassed, utterly fatigued by others, while isolation calms them, and the detachment and imaginative activity of their minds bathes them in peace.

— Guy de Maupassant, 88 Short Stories

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If snow is the silence that falls from the sky, perhaps rain is an endless sentence.

—Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon, Greek Lessons

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Emily Dickinson, from "There's a certain Slant of light,"

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The Struggle with the Sun Drawings 8.5 x 8 cm 2024

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Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958)

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As the dawn approached, I gave up trying to sleep. I threw a cardigan over my pajamas, padded out to the kitchen, and made some coffee. I sat at the kitchen table and watched the sky grow lighter by the minute. It had been a long time since I'd seen the dawn. At one end of the sky a line of blue appeared, and like blue ink on a piece of paper, it spread slowly across the horizon. If you gathered together all the shades of blue in the world and picked the bluest, the epitome of blue, this was the color you would choose. I rested my elbows on the table and looked at that scene, my mind blank. When the sun showed itself over the horizon, that blue was swallowed up by ordinary sunlight. A single cloud floated above the cemetery, a pure white cloud, its edges distinct. A cloud so sharply etched you could write on it. A new day had begun. But what this day would bring, I had no idea.

– Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

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A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill…It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

– James Joyce, from “The Dead,” Dubliners (Vintage, 1993)

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I want to lie down like a tired child and weep away this life and my diary shall receive me on its downy pillow. Most children do not know what they cry for; nor do I, altogether.

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 7 December 1925

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“Time” understood in the Greek manner, χρόνος, corresponds in essence to τόπος, which we erroneously translate as “space.” Τόπος is place, and specifically that place to which something appertains, e.g., fire and flame and air up, water and earth below. Just as τόπος orders the appurtenance of a being to its dwelling place, so χρόνος regulates the appurtenance of the appearing and disappearing to their destined “then” and “when.” Therefore time is called μακρός, “broad,” in view of its capacity, indeterminable by man and always given the stamp of the current time, to release beings into appearance or hold them back. Since time has its essence in this letting appear and taking back, number has no power in relation to it. That which dispenses to all beings their time of appearance and disappearance withdraws essentially from all calculation.”

Martin Heidegger, Parmenides

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Gadamer on Hegel: Self-Consciousness

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For as triumphant as the march of modern science has been, and as obvious as it is to everyone today that their awareness of existence is permeated by the scientific presuppositions of our culture, human thought is nonetheless continually dominated by questions for which science promises no answer.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 107

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not horses by Natalie Shapero

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what's wrong babe you've barely touched your potential even though all your elementary teachers really liked you and said you were gifted and that you were going to do great things

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Gustave Flaubert, from a notebook entry written c. September 1839 (x)

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… and then I think of my solitude and realize again that I am truly married to it and without it would be even more nerve-racked and impossible than I am.

— May Sarton, House by the Sea: A Journal (W. W. Norton, January 1, 1995)

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i hate that being emotionally unavailable is so associated with masculinity. which is why i must stay emotionally unavailable. for feminism.

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ever since I was little I knew I never wanted anyone to turn the big light on