the shadow of your shadow

I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can.

(Source: thatquote, via curious-earth)

I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.

(Source: theprobablestars, via daretobeoneofus)

All good books have one thing in common—they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you’ve read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever: the happiness and unhappiness, good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people, and the weather. If you can give that to readers, then you’re a writer.

(via daretobeoneofus)

tzarevitch:

Grand Duchesses of Russia Olga and Anastasia reading on board of Imperial Yacht. 

(via provincialsadness)

All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. … But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.

(Source: infinitives, via courageous)

I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

(Source: inherwar, via provincialsadness)

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

(via findingalice)

(Source: spoonsyogurt, via findingalice)

(via thingsorganizedneatly)

Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

(via filthiestlaugh)