The Floating Library

One puts oneself through such psychological damage in trying to avoid the threat of insanity. You start to approach the very thing you’re afraid of. . . . – David Bowie David derived comfort from leaving off his clothes, sometimes sitting cross-legged on the floor encircled by blaring hi-fi speakers, sometimes loping around the flat [...]

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Steak is expensive, dear, and you’ll not get it often, but as this is our first real dinner in our own home, I had to celebrate. I bought enough for two meals, because buying steak for one meal for two people is beyond any modest purse! So you’ll meet that steak again tomorrow, but I [...]

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. . . Such is the cowardice of society people. That of a lady who came to greet me by my name, was greater still. I tried to recall hers as I talked to her; I remembered quite well having met her at dinner, and could remember things that she had said. But my attention, [...]

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The power of disappointing them, it was true, must always be hers. But that was not enough: for when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them. – Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

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– (via joberholtzer)

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By Alexander Star nytimes In 1889, when Friedrich Nietzsche suffered the mental collapse that ended his career, he was virtually unknown. Yet by the time of his death in 1900 at the age of 55, he had become the philosophical celebrity of his age. From Russia to America, admirers echoed his estimation of himself as [...]

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opprobrium alone makes the crime . . . A race upon which a curse is laid and which must live in falsehood and perjury because it knows that its desire, that which constitutes life’s dearest pleasure, is held to be punishable, shameful, an inadmissible thing; which must deny its God, since its members, even when [...]

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* Urbane, to comfort them, the quaker librarian purred: He came a step a sinkapace forward on neatsleather creaking and a step backward a sinkapace on the solemn floor. Glittereyed his rufous skull close to his greencapped desklamp sought the face bearded amid darkgreener shadow, an ollav, holyeyed. He laughed low: In the shadow of [...]

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A Proust can only be someone isolated — is that the price genius must pay? We feel we must keep such an observer, such an implacable judge, at a distance, as though he were a large, hot brazier. – Jacques-Emile Blanche . . . [T]he style of Remembrance of Things Past is olympian, philosophical, seamless, [...]

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Lily Briscoe said yes and no and capped his comments (for she was in love with them all, in love with this world). Indeed, he almost knocked her easel over, coming down upon her with his hands waving shouting out, “Boldly we rode and well,” but, mercifully, he turned sharp, and rode off, to die [...]

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