La Proie Du Vent (1927)

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.

Sarah Perry, The Essence of Peopling

Seduction is a skill everybody needs to learn and apply.

Seduction is a high form of power, by making people excited about the idea of you and the reducing the resistance to the things you want.

The more seduced a person is = the higher the chance you are able to get what you desire.

In romance, in business, in life.

She had created a dream world for herself. If the slightest thing happened in the normal world which did not conform to the laws of her dream world, her heart rose up in outrage and she was in pain.

Ivan Goncharov, The Same Old Story (1847)

“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

musings on may

Franz Kafka Diaries, 1914-1923 | Felix Vallotton, The Dordogne with Carrenac (1925) | Vera Brittain, “Because You Died: Poetry and Prose of the First World War and After” | Jin Xingye | Haruki Murakami, "Norwegian Wood" | Jin Xingye

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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

Anaïs Nin, from the diary of Anais Nin, vol. VI: 1955-1966

Sergei Efron, from a letter to Max Voloshin, referring to Marina Tsvetaeva, featured in Earthly Signs, Moscow Diaries

Athenais by John William Godward (1908)