The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events. A stone is prototypical 'thing': we can ask ourselves where it will be tomorrow. Conversely, a kiss is an 'event'. It makes no sense to ask where the kiss will be tomorrow. The world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones. On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most 'thing-like' are nothing more than long events.

Carlo Rovelli

Ono no Komachi & Izumi Shikibu, tr. by Jane Hirshfield & Mariko Aratani, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan

i love paintings that look as if they have ghosts in them

you should always be careful when you fall back asleep again after waking up because sometimes you will just have a pleasant little snooze but sometimes you'll get trapped in TIME PRISON. unfortunately there is no way to predict this.

Federico Cesari in Tutto chiede salvezza (2022)

Tyler Hobbs, Return to Zero [Blue] 0.7, 2021, generative digital art

Chen Chen, “Quintessence: the Quotidian”

ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD 2023 Sundance Film Festival

When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I’m even pleased that I’m falling in just such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brother’s Karamazov (trans. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky)

Jannik Schümann (2020)

Love conquers by deception, With a simple, artless tune

Anna Akhmatova, excerpt from “In Tsarkoye Selo” (in Evening), The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova: Expanded Edition, trans. Judith Hemschemeyer (via soracities)

Ich auch, Bruder. Ich auch.

Franz Liszt’s beautiful composition, the third of three études (Il Lamento, La Leggierezza and this) published in 1849.

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott

James Baldwin, from Giovanni’s Room

I’ve been in a long process of trying to understand the difference between loneliness and solitude. Part of that is not being afraid of being alone, and then getting past that fear, and then starting to separate out what is loneliness, and what is solitude, and what is privacy, and what is secret? What is a natural separation of time and schedule, and what is abandonment—or rejection? What is rejection and abandonment, and what is just people taking space to do their own day or whatever? So, no. Now I don’t feel lonely at all. It feels like a big injury that healed.

Jenny Slate, interviewed by Dana Schwartz for Marie Claire (via sarahspy)