Seduction Is A Skill Everybody Needs To Learn And Apply.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question.

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect, 1961.

La Proie du vent (1927)

paul and the lovely linda 🕊️

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the hearts affections and the truth of imagination - what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not.

- John Keats

Athenais by John William Godward (1908)

reading in bed. painting by marta astrain.

“I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.”

— Fernando Pessoa (via antigonies)