Casablanca (1942), Dir. Michael Curtiz

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”

— David Foster Wallace

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (via the-book-diaries)

Danez Smith, Don't Call Us Dead

“Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore.”

— Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 451 (via the-book-diaries)

I do not believe that things will turn out well; but the idea that they might — that is of vital importance.

— Theodor Adorno

You think you are the greatest sufferer in the world?

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (via the-book-diaries)

Danez Smith, Don't Call Us Dead

« 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of mankind; he had had two friends, one of whom had died senselessly before he was known, the other of whom had now withdrawn so distantly into the ranks of the living that...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

“The difference between a dream and wakefulness: we know it’s real if it hurts.”

— Emily Eastman - “The First Time”