Best Fucking Thing I’ve Ever Read.

Boyfriend

Some girls say they don’t need a man. Some girls say men and women should be treated equally. A lot of girls don’t think boys should be protective or get jealous. Not me. I can’t go a day without asking my dad, brothers, or guy friends to help me. I definitely need a man. I don’t really feel the need for men and women to be treated equally. I want a relationship where I am my man’s little woman straight out of the 50s. And I daydream all the time about a man who will beat up anyone who he feels is hurting me or hitting on me without a second thought. I want a man who will fight other guys for me. And win. I’m looking for a man. Not a boy.

Requested! ENTP + Slytherin + Cancer + Daughter of Aphrodite (plus Fall Out Boy)

via weheartit

I was on a walk when I saw Death at a street corner. I didn’t like him so I just power-walked right past him. He got flustered and hurried after me while trying to talk to me, but I kept ignoring him.

“No one has ever made you feel this way, how I am loving you now: remember, remember because nobody else remembers. I remember, I do. Imagine for example, how we tread the pavements with your leather shoes, when we cross the bridge when you suddenly hum a song you have heard from nearby folks. It is quite so lovely how you do it. You do it in your own way, that I am moonstruck, as if the moonbeam is coming from your voice, that spontaneous illumination with your movements, your hands that are vital to your nails– transparent, colorless, like spring water in the brooks. If it is with you, these memories, arise, gently opening my heart to take you in– and you will eat me whole, because I feel so small, so small that I am melting, melting and caramelized. We are here, we are here, and nothing has escaped between us, as if the earth and sky meets halfway to give us space: the momentary pause of this liquid ether we hold in our hands, the palpitation in your chest, that is, how I know, time stand still.”

— Chuck Akot, from The Color of Charcoal and Other Essays, IF THE EARTH AND SKY MEETS HALFWAY 

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray | Oscar Wilde

In that great discourse with the living dead which we call reading, our role is not a passive one. […] We engage the presence, the voice of the book. We allow it entry, though not unguarded, into our inmost. A great poem, a classic novel, press in upon us; they assail and occupy the strong places of our consciousness. They exercise upon our imagination and desires, upon our ambitions and most cover dreams, a strange, bruising mastery. Men who burn books know what they are doing. The artist is the uncontrollable force; no western eye, since Van Gogh, looks on a cypress without observing in it the start of a flame. So, and in supreme measure, it is with literature. A man who has read Book XXIV of the Iliad - the night meeting of Priam and Achielles - or the chapter in which Alyosha Karamazov kneels to the stars, who has raid Montaigne’s chapter XX (Que philosopher c'est apprendre à mourir) and Hamlet’s use of it - and who is not altered, whose apprehension of his own life is unchanged, who does not, in some subtle yet radical manner, look on the room in which he moves, on those that knock at the door, differently - has read only with the blindness of physical sight. […] To read well is to take great risks. It is to make vulernable our identity, our self possession. In the early stages of epilepsy there occurs a characteristic dream (Dostoyevsky tells of it). One is somehow lifted free of one’s own body; looking backbone sees oneself and feels a sudden, maddening fear; another presence is entering one’s own person, and there is no avenue of return. Feeling this fear, the mind gropes to a sharp awakening. So it should be when we take in hand a major work of literature or philosophy, of imagination or doctrine. It may come to possess us so completely that we go, for a spell, in fear of ourselves and in imperfect recognition. He who has read Kafka’s Metamorphosis and can look into his mirror unflinching may technically be able to read print, but is illiterate in the only sense that matters.

George Steiner, “Humane Literacy” from Language and Silence (via mesogeios)

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (via merulae)

Audrey Hepburn cooling off on the set of Roman Holiday (1954)