tiger marti

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

—Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum (via bookmania)

At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.

—Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (via bookmania)

We are so used to releasing words, we don’t know what to do with them if they stay. No matter how many times we let them go, they come back. The words that matter always stay.

—David Levithan, The Realm of Possibility (via bookmania)

Love born in the brain is more spirited, doubtless, than true love, but it has only flashes of enthusiasm; it knows itself too well, it criticizes itself incessantly; so far from banishing thought, it is itself reared only upon a structure of thought.

—Stendhal, The Red and the Black (via bookmania)

I’m yours for ever—for ever and ever. Here I stand; I’m as firm as a rock. If you’ll only trust me, how little you’ll be disappointed. Be mine as I am yours.

—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (via bookmania)

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing. There are two opposing poles of wanting nothing: When one is so full and rich and has so many inner worlds that the outer world is not necessary for joy, because joy emanates from the inner core of one’s being. When one is dead and rotten inside and there is nothing in the world: not all the woman, food, sun or mind-magic of others can reach the wormy core of one’s gutted soul planet.

—Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath (via bookmania)

I liked you from the first. I admire you so much that I think it will be a great good fortune to have you always before me.

—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (via bookmania)

I liked you from the first. I admire you so much that I think it will be a great good fortune to have you always before me.

—Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (via bookmania)