I Actually Attack The Concept Of Happiness. The Idea That - I Don’t Mind People Being Happy - But The

"Let’s just call it a ghost cat, Walter Mitty."

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Although you mention Venice keeping it on your tongue like a fruit pit and I say yes, perhaps Bucharest, neither of us really knows. There is only this train slipping through pastures of snow, a sleigh reaching down to touch its buried runners. We meet on the shaking platform, the wind’s broken teeth sinking into us. You unwrap your dark bread and share with me the coffee sloshing into your gloves. Telegraph posts chop the winter fields into white blocks, in each window the crude painting of a small farm. We listen to mothers scolding children in English as if we do not understand a word of it– sit still, sit still. There are few clues as to where we are: the baled wheat scattered everywhere like missing coffins. The distant yellow kitchen lights wiped with oil. Everywhere the black dipping wires stretching messages from one side of a country to the other. The men who stand on every border waving to us. Wiping ovals of breath from the windows in order to see ourselves, you touch the glass tenderly wherever it holds my face. Days later, you are showing me photographs of a woman and children smiling from the windows of your wallet. Each time the train slows, a man with our faces in the gold buttons of his coat passes through the cars muttering the name of a city. Each time we lose people. Each time I find you again between the cars, holding out a scrap of bread for me, something hot to drink, until there are no more cities and you pull me toward you, sliding your hands into my coat, telling me your name over and over, hurrying your mouth into mine. We have, each of us, nothing. We will give it to each other.

For the Stranger  Carolyn Forché

Fascism is psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life … Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet … We ought not to underrate its emotional appeal.

George Orwell Cited in The Atlantic's 'What ISIS Really Wants?'

Tantra's an enormous subject and most of it, I guess, is just silliness and superstition- not worth bothering about. But there's a hard core of sense. You accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself.

Aldous Huxley Island (1962)

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…unfortunately, it’s true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (via naranzarian)

Christina Olson, 1947. Andrew Wyeth,1917–2009. Tempera on panel.