Jellyache

As a reader, you’re often inside one or more character heads, so you know what they’re feeling, even if they can’t exactly say it, or they say it so obliquely that the other characters don’t catch it. Readers are frequently reminded of the gulf between what people say and what they mean, and such moments prod us to become more attuned to gesture, tone, and language.

—Will Schwalbe, The End of Your Life Book Club (via distantheartbeats)

(via teachingliteracy)

Here is the test of wisdom;
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools;
Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it, to another not having it;
Wisdom is of the Soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities, and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the Soul.

Now I reëxamine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds, and along the landscape and flowing currents.

Here is realization;
Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him;
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.

—Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road

Tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.

—Alex Garland (via wanderforthblog)

(via aviez)

In the paternal house reign mother, laws, custom, and routine, and she wants to wrest herself from this past; she wants to become sovereign subject in her own turn: but socially she only accedes to her adult life by becoming woman; she pays for her liberation with an abdication; but in the midst of plants and animals she is a human being; a subject, a freedom, she is freed both from her family and from males. She finds an image of the solitude of her soul in the secrecy of forests and the tangible figure of transcendence in the vast horizons of the plains; she is herself this limitless land, this summit jutting toward the sky; she can follow, she will follow, these roads that leave for an unknown future; sitting on the hilltop, she dominates the riches of the world spread out at her feet, given to her, through the water’s palpitations, the shimmering of the light, she anticipates the joys tears, and ecstasies that she does not yet know; the adventures of her own heart are confusedly promised by ripples on the pond and patches of sun. Smells and colors speak a mysterious language, but one word stands out with triumphant clarity: ‘life’.

—Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex

If you see that some aspect of your society is bad, and you want to improve it, there is only one way to do so: you have to improve people. And in order to improve people, you begin with only one thing: you can become better yourself.

—Leo Tolstoy (via explore-blog)

(Source: , via teachingliteracy)