There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.‘
-T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’
in Collected Poems 1909-1962
‘His face was immediately forgettable.’ -Bruce Chatwin, Utz
‘Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.’ -Donna Tartt, The Secret History
‘In my photographic work I was always especially entranced, said Austerlitz, by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them, just like a photographic print left in the developing bath too long.‘ -W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
‘What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.’ -Alice Munro, Runaway
Anonymous asked:
Hi!! I love your blog! I was wondering where you got the prints of all those famous painting with cat faces in them?? I love them so much
Thank you! They’re notecards, which you can get from here.
‘Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.’ -Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
“Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake.” -Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time
"He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink."- Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
“Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling.” -Julian Barnes, The Only Story
“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.” -Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
‘That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.’ -Ali Smith, Winter
“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.” -Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
‘Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.’
-John Donne, The Sun Rising
‘What she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.’ - Alice Munro, ‘Powers’ in Runaway
Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - two novels on my tbr. (click the titles for more info)