virtuouslibertines69

[virtuouslibertines69]

"It was necessary to relearn to look at everything as if it were the first time. I looked at it as if it were the last." - Clarice Lispector, from a letter to Fernando Sabino wr. c. March 1959

[virtuouslibertines69]

"O vanity! The patching up of everything with big words! Vanity has a right and a wrong side; the right side is stupid, it is the negro with his glass beads; the wrong side is foolish, it is the philosopher with his rags. I weep over the one and I laugh over the other." - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Photography by Seanen Middleton

[virtuouslibertines69]

“Why do you love the woman you're in love with? Because she is. And that, after all, is God's own definition of Himself; I am that I am. The girl is who she is. Some of her isness spills over and impregnates the entire universe. Objects and events cease to be mere representations of classes and become their own uniqueness; cease to be illustrations of verbal abstractions and become fully concrete. Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses, with an almost audible squeak of derision, into its normal insignificance.” - Aldous Huxley, The Genius And The Goddess

Photography by Betina Du Toit

[virtuouslibertines69]

"What is the soul allowed to keep? Every Birth, every small gift, every ache? I know I have knelt just here, torn apart by loss." - Tracy K. Smith, from “Eternity,” published in The Awl

Art by Moonassi

[virtuouslibertines69]

"Life is a hideous invention of I know not whom. It lasts no time at all, and is worth nothing. One breaks one's neck in living. Life is a theatre set in which there are but few practicable entrances. Happiness is an antique reliquary painted on one side only." - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Photography by Kyle Thompson

[virtuouslibertines69]

“The trouble with fiction," said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.” - Aldous Huxley, The Genius And The Goddess

Art by Paolo Pedron

[virtuouslibertines69]

“Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life.” - Robin Sharma

[virtuouslibertines69]

"Tasting a mystery resembles getting the first flavor of a scandal; sainted souls do not detest this. There is some curiosity about scandal in the secret compartments of bigotry." - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Art by David Palumbo

[virtuouslibertines69]

“All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.” - Aldous Huxley, Island

Sempiteral by Oozium

[virtuouslibertines69]

“He led her out over the field where the whispering flowers rose in pale blue waves to her knees and she felt their soft petals against her bare flesh and she lay down among them and stretched her arms through them and pressed her lips against them and felt them all about her, accepting her and embracing her, and a kind of drunkeness possessed her.” - Tennessee Williams, from Selected Stories; “The Field of Blue Children,”

Art by Tanya Shatseva

[virtuouslibertines69]

"There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions." - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables Photography by Laura Makabresku

[virtuouslibertines69]

“Love casts out fear; but conversely fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth. What remains in the bum or studiedly jocular desperation of one who is aware of the obscene Presence in the corner of the room and knows that the door is locked, that there aren’t any windows. And now the thing bears down on him. He feels a hand on his sleeve, smells a stinking breath, as the executioner’s assistant leans almost amorously toward him. “Your turn next, brother. Kindly step this way.” And in an instant his quiet terror is transmuted into a frenzy as violent as it is futile. There is no longer a man among his fellow men, no longer a rational being speaking articulately to other rational beings; there is only a lacerated animal, screaming and struggling in the trap. For in the end fear casts out even a man’s humanity.” - Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence

Saint Vincent by Théodule Ribot

[virtuouslibertines69]

"You are killing me, but you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who." - Ernest Hemingway, from The Complete Works; “The Old Man and the Sea,”

The Great White by lpeters, DeviantArt

[virtuouslibertines69]

"No human sentiment can be as terrible as joy. It was the visage of a demon who has just found his damned soul." - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Art by Plácido Merino

[virtuouslibertines69]

“Liberties aren't given, they are taken.” - Aldous Huxley

Art by Jaroslaw Blaminsky

[virtuouslibertines69]

"- In her dream, she gave birth to a snake, and couched it like a baby in swaddling bands. - What food did it crave, this new-born monster? - She offered it her own breast in her dream, and with the milk it sucked a curd of blood." - Aeschylus, tr. by Herbert Smyth from The Complete Plays; “The Oresteia,”

Photography by Laura Makabresku

[virtuouslibertines69]

"The branch trembles when a hand approaches it to pluck a flower, and seems to both withdraw and to offer itself at one and the same time. The human body has something of this tremor when the instant arrives in which the mysterious fingers of Death are about to pluck the soul." -Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Art by Avie Dawn