Nonsensical Commonsense

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don’t blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being “in love”, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

— Louis de Bernières (via pavorst)

Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving.

— Madeleine L’Engle (via pavorst)

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.

— Carl Sagan (via pavorst)

bookmania:

from Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

— Milan Kundera, Laughable Loves (via pavorst)

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

— Mark Twain (via pavorst)

bookmania:

from You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers

To live is to change, to die one hundred deaths.

— Orleanna Price (The Posionwood Bible)

vintageblackglamour:

Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Rudolph Fisher and Hubert Delany (brother of the Delaney Sisters) overlooking St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem in the 1920s. Photo via the Schomburg Center. 

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

— Lisel Mueller, “Things” (via fleurishes)

I learn a great deal by merely observing you, and letting you talk as long as you please, and taking note of what you do not say.

— T. S. Eliot (via pavorst)

bookmania:

from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

bookmania:

from Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

dynamicafrica:

The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry: Fifth Edition

Throughout the century some of the most startlingly original poetry in the world has come from Africa. This new and substantially expanded edition, containing the poetry of ninety-nine poets (thirty-one of them in print for the first time) from twenty-seven countries, displays the wide-ranging forms or African verse: from war songs and political protests to poems about human love, African nature, and the surprises and ironies of modern life.

Featuring modern masters of African poetry — such as L. S. Senghor, Augustinho Neto, Tchicaya U Tam’si, Okot p’Bitek, and Christopher Okigbo — the volume also includes poets who are still at the beginning of their development. These rich and colorful pages demonstrate a passion, spontaneity, and sensuousness uncommon in most contemporary poetry.

- (source)

(via orobolicious)

black-culture:

A lynching in Miami, Florida, changed the political climate in Washington. On July 19, 1935, Rubin Stacy, a homeless African-American tenant farmer, knocked on doors begging for food. After resident complaints, Dade County deputies took Stacy into custody. While he was in custody, a lynch mob took Stacy out of the jail and murdered him. Although the faces of his murderers could be seen in a photo taken at the lynching site, the state did not prosecute the murder of Rubin Stacy.