James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Ta-Nehisi Coates, from Between the World and Me

Text ID: The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.

If you persevere, in time you will have an entirely different problem – not that life is meaningless, but rather that life has almost too much meaning. As the scales fall from your eyes the world rushes into focus, presenting itself with a kind of vibrational eloquence that can, at first, be almost overwhelming. Everything shimmers, everything clarifies, everything wrestles for your attention. Trees feel super-real, their roots plunged into the earth, their branches stretching to the sky, birds are flesh and blood souls, fragile with life, the sky unfolds and rolls, the ocean crashes, people fascinate, books are beautiful, children are whirling dynamos of chaos, dogs bark and cats meow, flowers shout, your neighbour glows, and God runs like a helix through all things. The world awaits you, humming with meaning. You are alive with potential. You are not dead.

— Nick Cave on getting clean, Red Hand Files #258

SARAH SNOOK at the 2022 HBO Post-Emmy Awards Reception in California. By Mark Leibowitz.

“But even when I am afraid, I keep on trusting you.”

— Psalm 56:3

This Is Why album tracklist with pictures

“Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?”

— Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country

“Right now I want a word that describes the feeling you get - a cold, sick feeling deep down inside - when you know something is happening that will change you, and you don’t want it to, but you can’t stop it. And you know, for the first time, for the very first time, that there will now be a before and an after, a was and a will be. And that you will never again be quite the person you were.”

— Jennifer Donnelly, A Northern Light

“I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl, a cry.” 

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“All the madnesses, each and every blinding one, they can all be traced back to the gates. Those carved monstrosities, those clay and chalk portals, existing everywhere and nowhere and all at once. They open, things are born, they close. The opening is easy, a pushing out, an expansion, an inhalation: the dust of divinity released into the world. It has to be a temporary channel, though, a thing that is sealed afterward, because the gates stink of “knowledge, they cannot be left swinging wide like a slack mouth, leaking mindlessly. That would contaminate the human world—bodies are not meant to remember things from the other side. There are rules. But these are gods and they move like heated water, so the rules are softened and stretched. The gods do not care. It is not them, after all, that will pay the cost.”

Excerpt From Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi

(Favourite female characters: Holly Golightly.)

Yes, I think that she was aromantic or at least in the aro spectrum. She was only with the man at the end of story, because it was 1959 and her character was kind of problematic itself. I love her so much. She is endearing and while a traumatised character, Holly was goofy and perceptive enough.

Janelle Monáe in GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY, Dir. Rian Johnson