Oyster Catcher

Oyster catchers are stocky birds with bright eye rings and bills. Their diet is much more varied than their name suggests.

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

— Sylvia Plath (via tofufruits)

13 ♥ / 17 January, 2012

nedhepburn:

Dating in New York.
Dating in New York is extremely difficult.
Dating in New York is extremely difficult because women get hit on all of the time, in every way imaginable.
Men are inherently lonely people because our defaults are either fucking or fighting related (not counting sleep; eating, obviously), and the New York City default is all about ‘survival’.
Combine the two previous bullet points and you have a recipe for disaster; a city full of angry dudes at half staff trying harder and harder at a game that women become increasingly bitter at ever being involved in it in the first place.
I don’t know what it must be like to be a woman in New York. It must be really difficult / freeing / one or the other, but not both.
Last night I was outside of a bar, and this woman dropped something from her purse and kept walking. It was one of those “buy 9 get the 10th free” things and I figured she’d want it back so I tapped her on the arm and tried to hand it back to her. “You dropped this”, I said, and she gave me a look as if I had just vomited shit out of my eyes. She didn’t take the damn card. This was in front of five people.
Her friend saw it and whispered “Don’t worry, I’ll take that”, but holy shit, how bitter can someone be when they drop something and someone tries to hand it back to them?
Perhaps its got to do more with the human condition.
Perhaps we are all just very, very lonely and defensive. We are all just monkeys still with money and guns.
That’s what I initially thought.
But then I saw a guy fingerbang his girlfriend over her skirt while at the bar, and it made me think.
Perhaps there are two types of men in this world:1. Guys that fingerbang people at bars, and2. Guys that don’t.
I looked around the bar and saw everyone else just stand around, waiting and wanting to be looked at. Men, women, everyone.
Perhaps we’re just looking for a hole to fill. I mean that metaphorically.
Or I guess the other way, too.
The human heart doesn’t want to be bitter. The brain does not want to be angry. These are not our default settings. These are switches and dials in our heads that have taken years, sometimes decades to change that way. It’s easier not to remember those original settings. It’s a lot easier to become what the world wants you to be, instead of making the world become what you want it to, which takes years, years, years.
Positivity is a marathon, not a sprint.
It’s just that these people have made many smaller decisions, split second ones, hundreds of them, to ignore that and turn the other way.
It’s a lot easier to focus on your own problems and project them.
Which is why I think she didn’t want to take her card back, because she thought I was trying some sort of maneuver.
Which is worrying in and of itself, because it’s just a card, lady. It’s not a proposal nor am I trying to fuck you.
Which, I guess, made me feel kinda sad for her
And people like her
Who look at an exchange like that and their take home is “Stacey, this guy outside the club tried to hand me something!” “Oh my god!” “I knooooow!”
And they don’t look at it any other way and chalk it up to their “Well I Never!” category in their head
And that whole cycle just breeds loneliness.
And you see people walking down the street hand in hand, and you wonder how they did it.
I guess through just ignoring everything I’ve just said, right?
It’s like that Bret Easton Ellis line “People are afraid to merge”, except he was talking about people on the freeway, really.
And I’m just talking about a lady dropping something on the sidewalk.

971 ♥ / 4 January, 2012

‘Suppose’ she used to say, ‘that I could succeed in writing as well as Shakespeare. It would be lovely, but what then? There is something wanting in literary art even at its highest. Literature is not enough.’
‘The greatest literature’, she said, ‘is still only mere literature if it has not a purpose commensurate with its art. Presence or absence of purpose distinguishes literature from mere literature, and the elevation of purpose distinguishes literature within literature. That is merely literary that has no other object than to please. Minor literature has a didactic object. But the greatest literature of all—the literature that scarcely exists—has not merely an aesthetic object, not merely a didactic object, but, in addition, a creative object: that of subjecting its readers to a real and at the same time illuminating experience. Major literature, in short, is an initiation into truth.’

— A. R. Orage remembers Katherine Mansfield (On Love, 1932)

12 ♥ / 12 December, 2011

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you; Act for yourself. Face the truth.

— Katherine Mansfield (via lunaseas)

0 ♥ / 12 December, 2011

She stopped a minute. And it seemed to her that kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her. She had no room for anything else.

— Katherine Mansfield, The Garden-Party (via flower-strike)

3 ♥ / 12 December, 2011

Make it a rule of life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can’t build on it; it’s only for wallowing in.

— Katherine Mansfield (via very-quotable)

6 ♥ / 12 December, 2011

You might drop your heart into me and never hear it touch bottom.

— Katherine Mansfield (via isawoods)

8 ♥ / 12 December, 2011

The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody’s fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.

— Katherine Mansfield (via starvingforthesun)

23 ♥ / 12 December, 2011

unfortunate:

brief by i enrapture on Flickr.

27 ♥ / 12 December, 2011

realkidsgoodbooks:

“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”
-Richard Feynman from “What is Science?”, presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, in New York City (1966) published in The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6 (1969)

17 ♥ / 8 December, 2011

I love red deer!

1334 ♥ / 29 November, 2011

ivorysprite:

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray.

21 ♥ / 23 November, 2011

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

— Richard Feynman (via sciencequotes). So true.

35 ♥ / 23 November, 2011

lookhowmessy:

Frieda Kahlo—“Without Hope”

6 ♥ / 23 November, 2011

To be stoically passive or heroically active?

To be or not to be, that is the question

Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

4 ♥ / 23 November, 2011

1
2
3
4
5
Older →