(via finestjoint)
“I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing. It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about. I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away? Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.”
Jack Kerouac (via atomos)
I once had a week-long workshop with writer Jack Kreitzer. I was twelve, and I had just finished the very first draft of what is slowly becoming Our Eyes to the Stars. He told me I was a still pond that ran very deep, and I never forgot what I learned from him.
This sheet was one of the most valuable. Said is Dead.
For the next thirty days, the word “said” is your enemy.
I remember when my 7th grade English teacher gave us this exact same hand-out before we wrote our short stories. This hand-out literally changed my entire writing style. Although I don’t have the time to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, I want to wish all my followers who are the best of luck! Don’t get discouraged and write on!
(Source: waitforhightide, via teachingliteracy)
“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”
“I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful –”
Sylvia Plath (via paperlover)
(Source: starfishblotsofink, via teachingliteracy)
“He was shy, timid, gentle, and kind, but he wrote gruesome and painful books. He saw the world as full of invisible demons, who tear apart and destroy defenseless people. He was too clear-sighted and too wise to be able to live; he was too weak to fight, he had that weakness of noble, beautiful people who are not able to do battle against the fear of misunderstandings, unkindness, or intellectual lies. Such persons know beforehand that they are powerless and go down in defeat in such a way that they shame the victor. He knew people as only people of great sensitivity are able to know them, as somebody who is alone and sees people almost prophetically, from one flash of a face. He knew the world in a deep and extraordinary manner. He was himself a deep and extraordinary world.”
Milená Jesenská (1896 - 1944), from her obituary to Franz Kafka. (via lastwaltzinvienna)
(Source: wine-loving-vagabond, via teachingliteracy)
“Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (via ageofreason)
