Ever Look At Historic Art And Writing And Artifacts And Just Realize We’ve All Only Ever Been Human

there is no audience to perform for, there is no approval, no admiration to attain. there is no role worth playing, there is no one to convince. let it go

must a woman be “beautiful”? is it not enough that she shake her fist at God and commit acts of heresy in the name of hedonism and lunar madness

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Joan Didion (via mythologyofblue)

history is fucked up and it sucks because all the people in it who had great viable werewolf names weren’t werewolves. like what the shit. if you knew nothing about history or literature i guess or whatever you’d see names like “virginia woolf” and “oscar wilde” and be like. ah yes. these are definitely some prime secret werewolf poorly masquerading as human intellectual situations? but neither of those people were real live werewolves, factually speaking? they did not take advantage of that opportunity. and i think we are all worse off for it actually 

Carl Vilhelm Holsøe, (1863-1835)- Reflections

“Ever since I could remember, I had feared being found wanting. If I did the work I wanted to do, it was certain not to measure up; if I pursued the people I wanted to know, I was bound to be rejected; if I made myself as attractive as I could, I would still be ordinary looking. Around such damages to the ego a shrinking psyche had formed: I applied myself to my work, but only grudgingly; I’d make one move toward people I liked, but never two; I wore makeup but dressed badly. To do any or all of these things well would have been to engage heedlessly with life — love it more than I loved my fears — and this I could not do. What I could do, apparently, was daydream the years away: to go on yearning for “things” to be different so that I would be different.”

— Vivian Gornick, The Cost of Daydreaming - NYTimes.com (via arabellesicardi)

Vikki Dougan photographed by Nina Leen, 1952

04/06/20 // god knows we like archaic kinds of fun // ig

I want to be famous, doing what? Everything! I will never be a poet, or a philosopher, or a scholar. I can only be a singer or painter. I want to be in vogue; that is the principal thing. Don’t shrug your shoulders, strict people, don’t criticize me with an affected indifference. You are just the same at the bottom. You are careful not to let it show. But that doesn’t keep you from finding, deep in yourselves, that I tell the truth. Vanity! Vanity! Vanity! The beginning and the end of everything, and the sole and eternal cause of everything. Whatever is not produced by vanity is born from our passions. Passions and vanity are the only masters of the world.

Marie Bashkirtseff, 5th April 1876 (via early20thcenturynerd)