A Different Stripe

“His job wasn’t temporary and things weren’t going to get any better–not that they were going to get any worse, barring some unforeseen catastrophe like atomic warfare or mental illness, but they weren’t going to get any better.”

— 

L.J. Davis, A Meaningful Life (with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem)

(If it’s any consolation, LJ Davis’s hero does try to improve his lot in life. Now, whether it comes to anything is something you’ll have to read the book to find out.)

via Sasha and the Silverfish

“If you look straight up, there’s a sky, and if you glance right in front of you, the face of an average person—though we don’t speak of average days and nights or an average nature. But isn’t the average actually what is solidest and best? I have no use for days or weeks of genius, or an extraordinary Lord God.”

— Robert Walser, Berlin Stories, trans. Susan Bernofsky (via differenceetrepetition)

“Doing what you wanted to do was the only training, the only preliminary, needed for doing more of what you wanted to do.”

— Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis (via estice)

“If a petal fell from a flower, he was startled, as if he had seen something which, like the progress of the clock’s hands, should be accomplished when no one is looking.”

— Elizabeth Taylor, A Game of Hide and Seek (via nimblit)

It’s always the right moment for a quip from M. Jules Renard
via the Atheist Meme Base

“It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent—lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that.”

— Tove Jansson, Fair Play (via goldenfeet)

no-kidding-brainless:

“I rewrite like anything, hoping and pruning and mucking about until I like the sound of it—it’s important to see how it looks.” Patrick Leigh Fermor

“An Observation,” words by Patrick Leigh Fermor, art by Alan Fletcher (Beware of Wet Paint).

(Postcard received via Postcrossing)

“That is all very senseless, but this senselessness has a pretty mouth, and it smiles.”

—  Jakob von Gunten, Robert Walser (via bestreadamerican)

“In the beginning was surprise that enthusiasm could exist, that the new faith could be stronger than all else, action more desirable than happiness and ideas more real than old facts; that the world could be more alive than the self.”

— Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years (via rednotebooks)

“I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”

—  Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
via whiskey river (via n-l)

“I’m thirty years old and eleven of those years have been wasted. I’m thirty and I still don’t know who I am, and still don’t know what it’s all for. I’ve seen nothing but blood and sweat and filth. I’ve done nothing but wait, wait, and wait some more.”

— The Post-Office Girl by Stefan Zweig (via writerinboston)

“It’s amazing how right you can be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you.”

— Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado (via itsfromabook)

“Whosoever enjoyes not this life, I count him but an apparition.”

— Thomas Browne, “Religio Medici”