Musings On May

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.

Increase and widen your desires till nothing but reality can fulfill them. It is not desired that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Desire is devotion. By all means be devoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well

- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

“I like people whose beauty entails something individually captivating; People whose beauty is as pure as tears. Oh how glorious the human heart can be! How terrifying, if it is also linked to the soul (for the heart alone does nothing for me). This idea of the “soul” perpetually haunts me. I keep wondering whether I can altogether love people in case the idea of the soul remains forever an open question to me. I don’t know if what I call “the soul” exists or not but if it does, I imagine it as a slowly dying ember. I imagine it as something dark, tormented and disgustingly gorgeous.”

— Anaïs Nin, Anaïs Nin’s Lost World: Paris In Words And Pictures (via violentwavesofemotion)

@aneid / sydney smith / unknown / @bakwaaas / @nutnoce / @dearestvita

I love the idea of jewelry being passed down in a family. The stories that it tells, the bodies that have worn them. I find it so simple yet so pure.

Ireland, Iran & Lebanon

— Franz Kafka, Letter to his father

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