“As You Read A Book Word By Word And Page By Page, You Participate In Its Creation, Just As A Cellist

“Before everything, before even humans, there were stories. A creature at a fire conjuring a world with nothing but its voice and a listener’s imagination. And now, me, and thousands like me, in little booths and rooms and mics and screens all over the world, doing the same for a family of listeners, connected as all families are, primarily by the stories we tell each other. And after, after fire, and death, or whatever happens next, after the wiping clean or the gradual decay, after the after…when there are only a few creatures left, there will be one at a fire, telling a story to what family it has left. It was the first thing, and it will be the last.”

— Welcome to Night Vale Episode 71, “The Registry of Middle School Crushes”  (via realhousewivesofnightvale)

Again I quoted a poet - to avoid sounding like a preacher myself - who had written, ‘What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from you.’ Not only our experiences, but all we have done, whatever great thoughts we may have had, and all we have suffered, all this is not lost, though it is past; we have brought it into being. Having been is also a kind of being, and perhaps the surest kind.

Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Virginia Woolf photographed by Gisèle Freund, 1939 / portrait of Virginia Woolf by Vanessa Bell, 1934

Vikki Dougan photographed by Nina Leen, 1952

saying “you are a burden on society” is just such a weird framing of priorities It’s like saying “wow, think how much better gas mileage your car would get if you weren’t sitting in it” or “think how dry that umbrella would be if you weren’t holding it in between you and the rainstorm”. the things we create? they’re for us. they are meant to carry us. they are meant to protect us. we are meant to hold them up to keep us dry. 

James Dean and Sal Mineo on the set of ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ (1955)

This map of Paris from 1778 has an incredible level of detail, complete with individual gardens.