Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.
— Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (via liquidnight)
27 December 2011 ♥ 225
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (via decrepito)
27 December 2011 ♥ 123
For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’
— John Greenleaf Whittier (via tooold4thiscrap)
27 December 2011 ♥ 12
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity… and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
― William Blake
― William Blake
— (via journalofanobody)
27 December 2011 ♥ 22
My room really has for me a touch of fairy. Is there anything better than my room? Anything outside? The kitten says not - but then it’s such a hunting ground for the kitten; the sun throws the shape of the window on to the carpet, and in those four little square fields the silly flies wander, ever so spied upon by the little lion under the sommier frill…
— Katherine Mansfield, diary entry (20th September 1918). (via acandleandawick)
27 December 2011 ♥ 63
KATHERINE MANSFIELD: To John Middleton Murry Sent from Redcliffe Road, Fulham, Saturday... →
27 December 2011 ♥ 18To John Middleton Murry Sent from Redcliffe Road, Fulham, Saturday night, May 18, 1917
My darling
Do not imagine, because you find these lines in your private book, that I have been trespassing. You know I have not — and where else shall I leave a love letter? For I long to write you a love…
Do you ever see all those people who used to go [to] Garsington? It seems like fifteen years ago - a Christmas morning when I came in & you were sitting up in bed covered with bright beads, little gay silk handkerchiefs, ribbons, cards, dividing your presents. You were so very sumptuous. I must say Garsington is my beau ideal of a house. Ottoline did bring it off amazingly. The appearance of the table was perfect always and the very scent was right. I shall always admire her for that. It was a triumph. Because she consulted nobody. It was all her own, and she took it so lightly - as a matter of course. I think of her breakfast cups now & her spoons with the tenderness of a burglar. I must say I do love civilized ways. At the same time driving out to Garsington in an open cart on a snowy night was rather a price to pay … and hard to forget - equally hard …
So you have seen little Mamselle Sullivan. Isnt S. a very proud parent? I am sure he will be absorbed in his baby. Where do they live now? What a pity it is you cant get a house in St John’s Wood. I think it is the one darling part of London. And I am always seeing such houses advertised on the back pages of the Sunday Times and the Observer. They sound ideal. Don’t you prefer it to Hampstead? It has a charm. But perhaps that is because I lived there in Carlton Hill for a long time when I was young and very very happy.? I used to walk about there at nights - late - walking and talking on nights in spring with two brothers.
So you have seen little Mamselle Sullivan. Isnt S. a very proud parent? I am sure he will be absorbed in his baby. Where do they live now? What a pity it is you cant get a house in St John’s Wood. I think it is the one darling part of London. And I am always seeing such houses advertised on the back pages of the Sunday Times and the Observer. They sound ideal. Don’t you prefer it to Hampstead? It has a charm. But perhaps that is because I lived there in Carlton Hill for a long time when I was young and very very happy.? I used to walk about there at nights - late - walking and talking on nights in spring with two brothers.
—
[To Dorothy Brett, from Katherine Mansfield, Chalet des Sapins, Montana-sur-Sierre, Switzerland, 13 December 1921.]
[source]
(via rockingliketwoolddrunkards)
27 December 2011 ♥ 21
There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.
— Derrick Jensen (via mythologyofblue)
12 December 2011 ♥ 745
