I Cant Believe Im Alive And Im Just Sitting In Silence Most Of The Time

“Fiction teaches us that the sorrows of living are meaningful. Fiction restores the meaning. The experience which is being lived day by day may seem futile, destructive because the vision of totality is lacking. In the novel it acquires a pattern. It is fiction. It reaches beyond pain to the pattern of meaningfulness which consoles us for all the agonies, and uncovers elevations.”

Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin: Volume Five 1947-1955

Carl Vilhelm Holsøe, (1863-1835)- Reflections

This map of Paris from 1778 has an incredible level of detail, complete with individual gardens.

Adam D. Thompson

weird how nothing about u is like, too small or too dumb to know bc it all comes together to become YOU. sending your friend a picture of your favorite snack is saying something important whether u realize it or not. wheres that palahniuk quote

It spoke to you so strangely, in a voice that slipped between waves of softly droning static from a television screen.

“Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live. Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. And everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds. Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous, surprising, upsetting, outlandish, or odd. Thousands of stories to tell in dozens of languages: the languages of strong features or weak chins, the languages of garish makeup and weird haircuts and startling clothes, fat and bony and hairy languages, the languages of any kind of beauty that’s not white. Nose languages, eyebrow languages, piercing and tattoo languages, languages of blemish and birthmark and scar. When you give up trying to declare yourself acceptable, there are so many new things to say.”

— What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness?, Jess Zimmerman (via xshayarsha)