April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.
— Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka (via delicateswans)
(Source: fatifer)
Pitch-black winter nights live in my bones.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, from Selected Letters (via violentwavesofemotion)
My melancholy is the most faithful sweetheart I have had.
— Søren Kierkegaard (via apoetreflects)
(Source: aplethoraofquotations)
We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.
— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet. (via ontheborderland)
(Source: thenastygal)
I don’t know if anybody else has this feeling. When you’re walking down the street and you catch your reflection in something like a car window or a shop window and you see your face and you think, ‘Who’s that?’
— Thom Yorke (via delicateswans)
(Source: i-hit-the-bottom-and-escape)
Winter Light dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1962
(Source: jamofalifetime)
I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein - Letter to Bertrand Russell
I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow…Absent from other people’s meaning, alien, accidental with respect to naive happiness, I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaninglessness of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bonds and beings.
— Julia Kristeva, “Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia” (via lovevoltaireusapart)
Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal toward rites I do not know, waiting for the lost ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
— Anne Sexton (via howtotalktogirlsdialectically)
Recently, when I got out of the elevator at my usual hour, it occurred to me that my life, whose days more and more repeat themselves down to the smallest detail, resembles that punishment in which each pupil must according to his offense write down the same meaningless (in repetition, at least) sentence ten times, a hundred times or even oftener; except that in my case the punishment is given me with only this limitation: “as many times as you can stand it.
— Franz Kafka, (via substantia-nigra)
(Source: violentwavesofemotion)
All were in a state of unrest and did not understand one another. Each thought that he alone possessed the truth.
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
I ought to have… become a star in the sky. Instead of which I have remained stuck on earth.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
