(via fyspringfield)
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice… and just as the touch of a button on our set will fill the room with music, so by taking down one of these volumes and opening it, one can call into range the voice of a man far distant in time and space, and hear him speaking to us, mind to mind, heart to heart.
—Gilbert Highet (via bookshavepores)
(Source: Spotify)
npr:
This is Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield, performing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” while floating around the International Space Station. You may have last seen the space station team walking around in outer space fixing stuff.
You will never do anything this cool.
— ‘Space Oddity’ In Space: Yes, Astronauts Are Still The Coolest Humans : Monkey See
You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretences of your civilization, which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
—Octave Mirbeau (via manicstreetstudent)
A Different Stripe: Kingsley Amis Goes to Church
“What’s it like in your country? We hear so many strange things of it which can’t be true. Not all of them.”
“It’s beautiful, Hubert, which nobody believes who hasn’t seen it. And various, because it’s so extensive. Seven hundred miles from north to south, four hundred miles across in…
Men Are The Best | Full Commentary By The Cleveland, OH Kidnapping Victims
Death lives!
Love that “Crush. Kill. Destroy.” is the default setting.
The Count.
If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.”
D. H. Lawrence on how to cure the social ills of Britain. 1908
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
—D.H. Lawrence (via aforceofcircumstance)
Happy Birthday, Glenn Ford - (May 1rst, 1916 - August 30th, 2006)
“I`ve never played anyone but myself on screen”.
(via the-dark-city)
