mythologyofblue

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“A name is precious; it carries inside it a language, a history, a set of traditions, a particular way of looking at the world. Losing it meant losing my ties to all those things too.” -Laila Lalami, The Moor's Account

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Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it.

-Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

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"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing it is not fish they are after." -Michael Baughman, excerpt from A River Seen Right (Lyons Press, 1995) p. 68-69, paraphrasing Henry David Thoreau

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"A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand."

-Ray Bradbury, excerpt from the short story, "A Sound of Thunder"

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“Telescopic view of Saturn.” A new manual of the elements of astronomy, descriptive and mathematical. 1868.

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“Long before God the Father, there she was – God the Mother. Where did she vanish to, this great mother goddess? How did we women become so completely dispossessed? It wasn’t that I wanted to replace a male god with a female god; it wasn’t that I wanted to find a religion at all. I was simply looking for some sense that women might have worth. And I found it: there in the old stories of my own native land, I found it. Filled with images of women creating, women weaving the world into being, I took up knitting. Thread by thread, stitch by stitch, I began to knit myself back into being. I had never thought of myself as being a particularly creative soul, but I discovered that creativity was a wide-ranging affair. I simply thought about what brought me joy, and I began to cultivate it. I dug my hands into this strange foreign soil, and I began to grow things. I began to reacquaint myself with the soft animal object that was my body. Slowly, spending more and more time outside, focusing on the wisdom of my senses rather than on what was going on inside my head, I began to weave myself back into the fabric of the Earth.” -Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted: A Journey to Authenticity and Belonging

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Martian Canals

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.” ― H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

This is the story of how an optical illusion and the mis-translation of one word led to the Victorians believing there was life on Mars…

Keep reading

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“Well, imagine if you did find a book of riddles, and you could start unraveling them, but they were really complicated. Mysteries would become apparent and thrill you. We all find this book of riddles and it’s just what’s going on. And you can figure them out. The problem is, you figure them out inside yourself, and even if you told somebody, they wouldn’t believe you or understand it in the same way you do.” -David Lynch

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"Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.” -Simon Schama, Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations

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Still, Uri Shulevitz

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“I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all.”

-Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men

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Piero della Francesca, Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro.

(Federico lost his nasal bridge and his right eye in a tournament.)

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“Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.” -Stanisław Lem, Solaris

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East of Eden, Shoji Ueda

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"If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self—himself—he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.” -Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

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G. Baxter, The Crystal Palace from the Great Exhibition, installed at Sydenham: sculptures of prehistoric creatures in the foreground, 1864