I learned a long time ago that life often introduces young people to situations they are in no way prepared for, even good girls, lucky girls who want for nothing. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.
From Roxane Gay’s superb, truly incredible essay on strength, stories, and the Hunger Games. (via mollitudo)
Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. But, in fact, a person’s sexual choice is the result and sum of their fundamental convictions. Tell me what a person finds sexually attractive and I will tell you their entire philosophy of life. Show me the person they sleep with and I will tell you their valuation of themselves. No matter what corruption they’re taught about the virtue of selflessness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which they cannot perform for any motive but their own enjoyment - just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity! - an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exultation, only on the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces them to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and accept their real ego as their standard of value. They will always be attracted to the person who reflects their deepest vision of themselves, the person whose surrender permits them to experience - or to fake - a sense of self-esteem .. Love is our response to our highest values - and can be nothing else.
Ayn Rand (via kingsrow)
Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (via stoirme)
Until you find something to fight for, you settle for something to fight against.
Chuck Palahniuk (via palahniukisgod)
I learned it at just twenty-one or twenty-two… at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood - that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump.
David Foster Wallace (The Pale King)
Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You (via gildings)
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you. […] What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (via honeyforthehomeless)
Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. And that’s why we love books - because we have so little need for reality. (via doubledaybooks)
“…Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it’s the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we’re finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it’s better to die having made the journey we’ve been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Concrete
There’s a loneliness that only exists in one’s mind. The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (via han-solo-dolo)
