summer stories

"How do you lose a word? Does it vanish into your memory, like an old toy in a chest, and lie hidden in the cobwebs and dust, waiting to be cleaned out and rediscovered? There was a time once when the Bengali language was an angry flood trying to break down her door. She would crawl into a closet and lock herself in, stuffing her ears to shut out those sounds. But a door was no defense against her parents’ voices: it was in that language that they fought, and the sounds of their quarrels would always find ways of trickling under the door and through the cracks, the level rising until she thought she would drown in the flood. Their voices had a way of finding her, no matter how well she hid. The accumulated resentments of their life were always phrased in that language, so that for her its sound had come to represent the music of unhappiness. As she lay curled in the closet, she would dream of washing her head of those sounds; she wanted words with the heft of stainless steel, sounds that had been boiled clean, like a surgeon’s instruments, tools with nothing attached except meanings that could be looked up in a dictionary - empty of pain and memory and inwardness"

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Amitav Ghosh (The Hungry Tide)

"I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books."

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C. S. Lewis (via amorette)

(via the-nightingale-and-the-rose)

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

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George Orwell (via little-hugs)

(via whiskeyorwellandcigarettes)

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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Tom Hiddleston reads When You Are Old by W. B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

(Source: lazyocean, via fuckyestomhiddlestonsvoice)

Like constellations, she had mapped the words of her heroes and patrons upon the night sky of her mind. Just as with the stars themselves, it was in her darkest hours that their missives shone most brightly, only to fade away in the moments of relative calm that followed in the wake of the sun.

"Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating in
F.W"

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Captain Frederick Wentworth (Jane Austen, Persuasion)

"We all impose limits on ourselves. We think, ‘There’s the ceiling and that’s as far as I can go.’ Then something happens and it changes everything."

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Tom Hiddleston

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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Tom Hiddleston reads He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven by W. B. Yeats

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

(Source: lazyocean, via the-nightingale-and-the-rose)

"Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

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George Orwell (via books-quoted)

(via whiskeyorwellandcigarettes)