Backyard Fruit

"He would pick up eggshells, a bird’s wing, a jawbone […] He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death in my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses."

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

"He can’t wear them, Buck Mulligan told his face in the mirror. Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can’t wear grey trousers."

James Joyce, Ulysses

"He went back to his section and folded into a slouched position and settled one foot on a pipe that ran under the window. Eastrod filled his head and then went out beyond and filled the space that stretched from the train across the empty darkening fields."

Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood

"Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand."

Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (via shesanargonaut)

(via thenakedbrowneye)

"Et c’était comme quatre coups brefs que je frappais sur la porte du malheur."

L’étranger, Albert Camus

“Un serpent boa qui digerait un elephant.”

Le Petit Prince Nursery School Designed by AR+TE Architects in Saint-Nom la Breteche, France, inspired by drawings and writings by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

So lovely when culture, craft, form & function, illustration & literature all get together and spawn. I want to hug this building. Je t’aime… 

Found on this blog: http://patrichotomy.wordpress.com/

"Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes."

The Mind’s Eye, by Oliver Sacks

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

"Nothing will ever replace the experience of wandering haphazardly through a great bookstore, no matter how many algorithms are developed to find matches for our tastes. That’s because not only is there no accounting for taste, there is no predicting it either."

Dominique Browning, author of Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness, on her blog via Shelf Awareness http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=1361 (via bookishquotes)

(Source: pageandoven, via otherpress)

My favorite books were at all one time banned. They also all have some pretty amazing cover art. Unfortunately, I don’t own any of these particularly cool editions. In need of inspiration tonight. Big time.

"Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind, there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?"

Joan Didion, from her essay ”Why I Write”

“Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.” - Salman Rushdie

(Source: futurejournalismproject.org, via schlomo)

“To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object being photographed.”

- Joan Didion, from her essay “Why I Write”