“…we can see ourselves turning into memories. We are these memories. As of this moment, we’ll remember each other as we’ll remember a distant world disappearing into a blueness more blue than it used to be. We’ll part in the pitch of longing.”
— Mahmoud Darwish, from Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi)
Bernhard Schlink, The Reader (translated by Carol Brown Janeway)
i know the end, phoebe bridgers <3
bitches say they’re fine and then scream the “I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all” in bohemian rhapsody louder than everyone else
“I wouldn’t trade my solitude for a little love. For a lot of love, yes. But a lot of love is itself a kind of solitude.”
— Dulce María Loynaz, from “Poem XCVI,” trans. James O’Connor, Absolute Solitude: Selected Prose Poems (First Archipelago, 2016)
“But being lonely and being alone are not the same, and [Elizabeth] Bishop recognized from a young age that there was something special, even salvific, about the latter. ‘There is a peculiar quality about being alone, an atmosphere that no sounds or persons can ever give,’ she wrote in [her] 1929 essay, “On Being Alone,” 'It is as if being with people were the Earth of the mind, the land with its hills and valleys, scent and music: but in being alone, the mind finds its Sea, the wide, quiet plane with different lights in the sky and different, more secret sounds.’ I understood this sentiment well, the special beauty of the blue hours when you are, by choice, alone, and the candle of your self burns in a way it never quite can when you are with someone else.”
— Gabrielle Bellot, from “Alone with Elizabeth Bishop,” NYR Daily (20 September 2018)
“Tell people that you just woke up after 10 hours of sleep and still feel tired. Tell people that you need a break from talking with them and that you need some space for a while. Tell people that you love them so much but at the same time have this desperate need to be alone. Tell people that this is how it’s going to be at times. Tell people the truth and the ones who really do love you in return will understand your limitations in terms of human connection.”
— Juansen Dizon, Openness
“Melancholia : it’s a habitual feeling of our imperfection… It can also be a product of ideas about a certain perfection that is not found either in ourselves or in others, in the objects of our pleasure or in nature.”
Definition of the melancholia by Diderot in the Encyclopédie
Painting : Automat by Edward Hopper in 1927
“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”
— Jodi Picoult
“My solitude doesn’t depend on the presence or absence of people; on the contrary, I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche
“Sometimes the things that make you feel isolated from the world are gentle reminders from the universe telling you that it’s okay to be both lonely and happy. Being soft, calm and warm all by yourself is a sign that you are very much in good company.”
— Juansen Dizon
“I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
