“November comes And November goes, With the last red berries And the first white snows. With night coming early, And dawn coming late, And ice in the bucket And frost by the gate. The fires burn And the kettles sing, And earth sinks to rest Until next spring.”

— Clyde Watson

Photo by myself somewhere in Germany

#quotes #november #winter #herbst #autumn #quote #Clyde watson #watson #leipzig #parks #germany #nature #last bits of sunlight

riverbambi

I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous [person], the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the [person] in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.

Henry Miller, Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

#quotes #quote #literature #text #henry miller #searching #meaning #wanderer #lonely soul #ridiculous #the absurd #unattainable

riverbambi

And so I ask myself: 'Where are your dreams?' And I shake my head and mutter: 'How the years go by!' And I ask myself again: 'What have you done with those years? Where have you buried your best moments? Have you really lived? Look,' I say to myself, 'how cold it is becoming all over the world!' And more years will pass and behind them will creep grim isolation. Tottering senility will come hobbling, leaning on a crutch, and behind these will come unrelieved boredom and despair. The world of fancies will fade, dreams will wilt and die and fall like autumn leaves from the trees...

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

#quotes #literature #text #poetry #quote #fyodor dostoyevksy #dostoyevsky #existentialism

riverbambi

Some days you exist like the last speaker of an extinct language. These are the silences that litter the heart.

Richard Jackson, Retrievals

#quotes #richard jackson #retrievals #literature #poetry #quote #short texts #text

riverbambi

Albert Camus, The Stranger

He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man. Whereas it looked as if I was the one who’d come up empty handed. But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of my death I had waiting for me… I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that… Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I've lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people’s deaths or a mother’s love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we’re all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers?

#albert camus #camnus #the stranger #currently reading #life #quotes #quote #book quotes

riverbambi

There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!

Hermann Hesse

#hermann hesse #literature #writers #authors #quotes #quote #book quote

riverbambi

I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?

Margaret Atwood

#Margaret Atwood #quotes #quote

riverbambi

She was breathing deeply, she forgot the cold, the weight of beings, the insane or static life, the long anguish of living or dying. After so many years running from fear, fleeing crazily, uselessly, she was finally coming to a halt. At the same time she seemed to be recovering her roots, and the sap rose anew in her body, which was no longer trembling. Pressing her whole belly against the parapet, leaning toward the wheeling sky, she was only waiting for her pounding heart to settle down, and for the silence to form in her. The last constellations of stars fell in bunches a little lower on the horizon of the desert, and stood motionless. Then, with an unbearable sweetness, the waters of the night began to fill her, submerging the cold, rising gradually to the center of her being, and overflowing wave upon wave to her moaning mouth. A moment later, the whole sky stretched out above her as she lay with her back against the cold earth

Albert Camus

#Albert Camus #quotes #quote #literature

riverbambi

This darkness is for sleeping, for escape; it’s where I go when the other places ache with light; this is where I curl up and close my eyes and darkness flows like lava, and I dissapear into what, into nothing, into pure dark, into what there is before there is anything else.

Leslie Pietrzyk

#quotes #quote #darkness

riverbambi

I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it

William Carlos Williams

#quote #quotes #William Carlos Williams

riverbambi

Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

#currently reading #love #quote #hermann hesse #own

riverbambi

By Marcel Proust

[…] A book is a huge cemetery in which on the majority of the tombs the names are effaced and can no longer be read. Sometimes on the other hand we remember a name well enough but do not know whether anything of the individual who bore it survives in our pages. That girl with the very deep-set eyes and the drawling voice, is she here? and if she is, in what part of the ground does she lie? we no longer know, and how are we to find her beneath the flowers? But sine we live at a great distance from other human beings, since even our strongest feelings and in this class had been my love for my grandmother and for Albertine — at the end of a few years have vanished from our hearts and become for us merely a word which we do not understand, since we can talk casually of these dead people with fashionable acquaintances whose houses we still visit with pleasure though all that we loved has died, surely then, if there exists a method by which we can learn to understand these forgotten words once more, is it not our duty to make use of it, even if this means transcribing them first into a language which is universal but which for that very reason will at least be permanent, a language which may make out of those who are no more, in their truest essence, a lasting acquisition for the minds of all mankind? And as for that law of change which made these loved words unintelligible to us, if we succeed at least in explaining it, is not even our infirmity transformed into strength of a new kind?

#quote #poetry #literature #books

riverbambi

At any given moment, any time, any day of your existence, you can look at your whole life as a vast collection of experiences, and recognize that all of it adds up exactly to who you’ve become today. Who you became depended — to a degree you may never appreciate — on who you happened to run into while you were out in the world doing your thing. You could have been so many different people. All relationships are temporary. They change form and texture as time passes, and they eventually go. If it’s been a special one — with a lover, an important teacher, a parent – its absence can be a heavy one. Almost tangible. You can feel the presence of their absence. The Other is gone. An empty desk, an unused pillow, an open doorway with no one standing in it. But you’re still there, and you’re better than you were.

David Cain

#quote #quotes #lit

riverbambi reblogged

mental-allure

seabois

Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.

Anaïs Nin

Source: seabois

#Anaïs Nin #quote

riverbambi

But there was still something missing. Something that nagged at her-an emptiness she couldn't explain. There were mornings she woke with her heart pounding wildly and the sensation of arms wrapped around her. But the feeling slipped away the moment she opened her eyes, and no matter how quickly she squeezed them shut, she couldn't recapture the contentment she'd felt

Kirsten Miller

#quote #quotes

riverbambi

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

#quote #quotes

riverbambi reblogged

Mountains inspire awe in any human person who has a soul. They remind us of our frailty, our unimportance, of the briefness of our span upon this earth. They touch the heavens, and sail serenely at an altitude beyond even the imaginings of a mere mortal.

Elizabeth Aston

Source: acraeus

#quote