#ro.books

[arorkive]

My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?

Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

[arorkive]

"If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets."

Kafka on the shore, Haruki Murakami

[arorkive]

Ulisses, remember how you once asked me why I voluntarily kept away from people?

Now I can tell you.

It’s because I don’t want to be platonic in relation to myself. I’m profoundly defeated by the world I live in. I separated myself just for a while because of my defeat and because I felt that other people were defeated too. So I closed myself up in an individualization that if I hadn’t been careful could have been transformed into a hysterical or contemplative solitude.

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector

[arorkive]

But, though I mightn't be so sure about what interested me, I was absolutely sure about what didn't interest me.

The Stranger, Albert Camus

[arorkive]

But how could you live and have no story to tell?

Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights

[arorkive]

(what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying)

The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus

[arorkive]

No, no, she wasn’t lost, she was even going to make a list of things she could do!

She sat with a blank page and wrote:

eat — look at fruit in the market — see people’s faces — feel love — feel hate — have something not known and feel an unbearable suffering — wait impatiently for the beloved — sea — go into the sea — buy a new swimsuit — make coffee — look at objects — listen to music — holding hands — irritation — be right — not be right and give in to someone who is — be forgiven for the vanity of living — be a woman — do myself credit — laugh at the absurdity of my condition — have no choice — have a choice — fall asleep — but of bodily love I shall not speak.

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures by Clarice Lispector

[arorkive]

She is my hope and for that she is dangerous, unequivocally, but she is also alive, unreservedly. It took this long for me to finally understand.

Alone With You in the Ether, Olivie Blake.

[arorkive]

“You won’t understand what I mean now, but someday you will: the only trick of friendship, I think, is to find people who are better than you are—not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving—and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and to try to listen to them when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad—or good—it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. But the best, as well.”

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara.

[arorkive]

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just waiting for something that will never happen,” he said. “Like I’m just existing from day to day but will never really matter. I get up in the morning because I have to, because I have to do something or I’m just wasting space, or because if I don’t answer the phone my dad will be alone. But it’s an effort, it takes work. I have to tell myself, every day, get up. Get up, do this, move like this, talk to people, be normal, try to be social, be nice, be patient. On the inside I just feel like, I don’t know, nothing. Like I’m just an algorithm that someone put in place.”

Alone With You in the Ether, Olivie Blake.

[arorkive]

"That’s the truth. I didn’t kill Gabriel. He killed me. All I did was pull the trigger."

-The Silent Patient, Alex Michaelides.

[arorkive]

"I wonder what level of crazy I’ve reached and how much further I could go, how many more steps until I become a woman who boards up the windows to live uninterrupted in the filth of her past."

My Dark Vanessa, Kate Elizabeth Russell

[arorkive]

Here I am, a bundle of past recollections and future dreams, knotted up in a reasonably attractive bundle of flesh. I remember what this flesh has gone through; I dream of what it may go through.

The unabridged journal of Sylvia Plath

[arorkive]

“He didn’t see the problem in loving her that way, with a savagery that felt as ancient as his sorrows, until he realized that he could no longer recall a life without her. It was as if the older versions of him had been erased and could no longer exist. He realized that his relationship with time, whatever it was before, was now forever altered.”

Alone With You in the Ether, Olivie Blake.

[arorkive]

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. 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

[arorkive]

"Yes it does, he doesn’t want to be the person she hides from, he wants to be the person she hides with. These are distinct, doesn’t she realize? Does she have any idea how difficult he finds it to exist with other people? And then here she is, this mystery, this puzzle, does she even know how much he loves her unpredictability, her twists and turns? She thinks her brain is some sort of problem? Fine, good, he loves problems."

Alone With You in the Ether, Olivie Blake.