conorsmonster - Tumblr blog

[conorsmonster]

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

[conorsmonster]

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

[conorsmonster]

Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.

The Stranger

By Albert Camus

[conorsmonster]

"Well, so I'm going to die." Sooner than other people will, obviously. But everybody knows life isn't worth living. Deep down I knew perfectly well that it doesn't much matter whether you die at thirty or at seventy, since in either case other men and women will naturally go on living and for thousands of years. In fact, nothing could be clearer. Whether it was now or twenty years from now, I would still be the one dying. At that point, what would disturb my train of thought was the terrifying leap I would feel my heart take at the idea of having twenty more years of life ahead of me.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

[conorsmonster]

My mom told me cities don’t change. But cities are people and all people ever do is change.

[conorsmonster]

As I stared down at Constantin the way you stare down at a bright, unattainable pebble at the bottom of a deep well, his eyelids lifted and he looked through me, and his eyes were full of love.

Page no. 95

Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

[conorsmonster]

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

[conorsmonster]

For the first time in my life, sitting there in the sound-proof heart of the UN building between Constantin who could play tennis as well as interpret and the Russian girl who knew so many idioms, I felt dreadfully inadequate. The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.

The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

[conorsmonster]

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

[conorsmonster]

Never mistake people’s exterior characteristics for reality, for the character they show on the surface may be merely a reflection of the people with whom they have been most in contact, or a front disguising it’s own opposite.

Art of Seduction - Robert Greene

[conorsmonster]

Don’t you think it should cost less to be alive?

- The Humans (2021)

[conorsmonster]

You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul.

Mary Oliver’s Upstream

[conorsmonster]

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive — that they don’t feel that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

Mary Oliver, Upstream

[conorsmonster]

And that is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness — the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books — can re-dignify the worry-stung heart.

Mary Oliver, Upstream

[conorsmonster]

I did not think of language as a means to self description. I thought of it as the door — a thousand opening doors! — past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and, thus, to come into power.

Mary Oliver, Upstream

[conorsmonster]

Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labour to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure.

Mary Oliver, Upstream

[conorsmonster]

Of this there can be no question—creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the forces of gravity.

Mary Oliver, Upstream