anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Beautiful vintage book spines H.G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Albert Camus, W. Somerset Maugham, Miguel de Cervantes
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-seeker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy stores or Bradshaw’s Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works. At one time I never went out without a second-hand bookseller’s list in my pocket. I know no reading more fruity. Of course to read in this way is as reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the illiterate. From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug that we cannot do without- who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him? —and so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of the hypodermic needle or the pint-pot. And like the dope-fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter. Books are so necessary to me that when in a railway train I have become aware that fellow-travellers have come away without a single one I have been seized with a veritable dismay. But when I am starting on a long journey the problem is formidable.
'new' used book finds [one a first edition!] + eco-friendly spiralbound, courtesy the local library & mermaid lit trove
¢10-25 each, hells yeah
#this is what i spent some of my hard earned money/hock profits on the other day#because of course#books#more books#theodore roethke#w. somerset maugham#joan didion#isak dinesen#albert camus#fyodor dostoyevsky#marguerite duras#my books#bibliophile#the year of magical thinking#l'amante anglaise#the brothers karamazov#exile and the kingdom#lit#poems#seven gothic tales#of human bondage#mine
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
fables-of-the-reconstruction-de
He remembered the bitterness of his life at school, the humiliation which he had endured, the banter which had made him morbidly afraid of making himself ridiculous; and he remembered the loneliness he had felt since, faced with the world, the disillusion and the disappointment caused by the difference between what it promised and what it gave. But notwithstanding he was able to look at himself from the outside and smile with amusement.
W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (via fables-of-the-reconstruction)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.
W. Somerset Maugham (via bbook)
anenlighteningellipsis reblogged
supermodelgif-deactivated201409
I’ve always been interested in people, but I’ve never liked them.
W. Somerset Maugham (via mirroir)
I daresay one profits more by the mistakes one makes off ones’ own bat than by doing the right thing on someone else’s advice.
W. Somerset Maugham