"The little boy learns that he must act like a boy, do things, prove that he is a boy, and prove it over and over again, while the little girl learns that she is a girl, and all she has to do is to refrain from acting like a boy."
— Margaret Mead, Male and Female
"My imagination longs to dash ahead and plan developments; but I have noticed that when things happen in one’s imaginings, they never happen in one’s life, so I am curbing myself."
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
"But luxury has never appealed to me. I like simple things: books, being alone, or with somebody who understands."
— Daphne du Maurier (via larmoyante)
"Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again."
— Homer, The Iliad (via 13neighbors)
(via cuntlery)
"I am a restlessness inside a stillness inside a restlessness."
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
"But most of the time, I just thought. And what I thought about most was luxury. I had never realized before that it is more than just having things; it makes the very air feel different. And I felt different, breathing that air: relaxed, lazy, still sad but with the edge taken off the sadness. Perhaps the effect wears off in time, or perhaps you don’t notice it if you are born to it, but it does seem to me that the climate of richness must always be a little dulling to the senses. Perhaps it takes the edge off joy as well as off sorrow."
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
"Even if I don’t like what I am, I know what I am."
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
"When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don’t suppose many people try to do it."
— Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle
"Though he’d never been religious, he realized now that he’d always believed in the soul, in a force of personality that survived death. But as his mind continued to waver, to short-circuit, he finally arrived at the cold-eyed conclusion, so at odds with his youthful cheerfulness, that the brain was just an organ like any other and that when it failed he would be no more."
— Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
"I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself."
— Simone de Beauvoir (via aliceincrohnsland)
(via dendroica)
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