Sunset
Porto, Portugal
“The music is the silence coming true.” - Philip Roth in The Human Stain
Spring
Oxford University Parks
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(Reblogged from booklover)
Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain—the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed—then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
Vladimir Nabokov (via thegirlandherbooks)
(Source: how-novelistic)
Taken with instagram
Why Old Books Smell Good
“Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.
—From Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez’s Perfumes: the guide
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Artists are not here to destroy or to create. Creating is just as simple and artless a thing to do as destroying…artists change the value of things. And by doing that, artists can change the world into a Utopia where there is total freedom for everybody.
Yoko Ono, What Is the Relationship Between the World and the Artist?
Henry David Thoreau (pg. 66 in “Walden”)
On reading:
“To read well, that is, to read books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”
(Reblogged from cuntented)
