gretagarboreincarnate

Latest Posts by gretagarboreincarnate

“Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow" - Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt & Emmylou Harris performing on The Dolly Parton Show (1976)

"The Brothers Karamazov", Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Constance Garnett)

Ireland, Iran & Lebanon

Sergei Efron, from a letter to Max Voloshin, referring to Marina Tsvetaeva, featured in Earthly Signs, Moscow Diaries

Kurt Vonnegut, from Mother Night; "Chapter Six Hundred & Fourty Three,"

I just want to create a beautiful life for myself and others. I want peace and quiet in my house in the mountains, a garden filled with blooming flowers and happy cats. Sunkissed mornings on a white porch enjoying a slow morning routine, with a cup of black tea in dainty floral teacups, vintage 50s music drifting from the kitchen along with the scent of pancakes & homemade jam. A house that smells like home, like fresh bread, like serenity. A hall filled with art in beautiful ornate frames. The freedom to create what I love and share it with others. I will create my own kind of happiness and I truly believe everybody deserves to create for themselves whatever life offers them the most happiness.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question.

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect, 1961.

Anaïs Nin, from the diary of Anais Nin, vol. VI: 1955-1966

La Proie du vent (1927)

'You have everything but one thing: madness. A man needs a little madness or else - he never dares cut the rope and be free.'

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“I felt once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else. And all that is required to feel that here and now is happiness is a simple, frugal heart.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis, tr. by Carl Wildman, from “Zorba the Greek,” wr. c. 1946

@aneid / sydney smith / unknown / @bakwaaas / @nutnoce / @dearestvita

Do everything with Love.

Sarah Perry, The Essence of Peopling

“I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.”

— Fernando Pessoa (via antigonies)

“I like people whose beauty entails something individually captivating; People whose beauty is as pure as tears. Oh how glorious the human heart can be! How terrifying, if it is also linked to the soul (for the heart alone does nothing for me). This idea of the “soul” perpetually haunts me. I keep wondering whether I can altogether love people in case the idea of the soul remains forever an open question to me. I don’t know if what I call “the soul” exists or not but if it does, I imagine it as a slowly dying ember. I imagine it as something dark, tormented and disgustingly gorgeous.”

— Anaïs Nin, Anaïs Nin’s Lost World: Paris In Words And Pictures (via violentwavesofemotion)

musings on may

Franz Kafka Diaries, 1914-1923 | Felix Vallotton, The Dordogne with Carrenac (1925) | Vera Brittain, “Because You Died: Poetry and Prose of the First World War and After” | Jin Xingye | Haruki Murakami, "Norwegian Wood" | Jin Xingye

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She had created a dream world for herself. If the slightest thing happened in the normal world which did not conform to the laws of her dream world, her heart rose up in outrage and she was in pain.

Ivan Goncharov, The Same Old Story (1847)

Athenais by John William Godward (1908)

I shall live on dreams because reality is too cruel for me. I think I shall be the kind of person that nobody understands,

Anaïs Nin, Linotte: The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1914-1920

Increase and widen your desires till nothing but reality can fulfill them. It is not desired that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness. Desire is devotion. By all means be devoted to the real, the infinite, the eternal heart of being. Transform desire into love. All you want is to be happy. All your desires, whatever they may be, are expressions of your longing for happiness. Basically, you wish yourself well

- Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

We notice unusually beautiful things because they jolt us out of a state of unawareness. The secret is that we are surrounded by beauty everyday. We just have to make a conscious effort to notice and appreciate it.

Seduction is a skill everybody needs to learn and apply.

Seduction is a high form of power, by making people excited about the idea of you and the reducing the resistance to the things you want.

The more seduced a person is = the higher the chance you are able to get what you desire.

In romance, in business, in life.

paul and the lovely linda 🕊️

“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

— George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss