No One Is Ever Holy Without Suffering.

“I’m not sentimental — I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last — the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

Do not look for my heart any more, the beasts have eaten it.

Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil (via the-book-diaries)

« Dispassionately, reasonably, he contemplated the failure that his life must appear to be. He had wanted friendship and the closeness of friendship that might hold him in the race of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that...

He had wanted the singleness and the still connective passion of marriage; he had had that, too, and he had not known what to do with it, and it had died. He had wanted love; and he had had love, and had relinquished it, had let it go into the chaos of potentiality. Katherine, he thought. "Katherine."

And he had wanted to be a teacher, and he had become one; yet he knew, he had always known, that for most of his life he had been an indifferent one. He had dreamed of a kind of integrity, of a kind of purity that was entire; he had found compromise and the assaulting diversion of triviality. He had conceived wisdom, and at the end of the long years he had found ignorance. And what else? he thought. What else?

What did you expect? he asked himself. »

Stoner - John Williams

449. Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss (1777) - Antonio Canova, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Isn’t giving up allowed sometimes? Isn’t it okay to say, ‘This really hurts, so I’m going to stop trying?’ ‘It sets a dangerous precedent.’ ‘For avoiding pain?’ ‘For avoiding life.’

Rainbow Rowell, Fangirl (via the-book-diaries)

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

Cormac McCarthy (via quotemadness)

“Life just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned