💡  "The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library." – Albert Einstein

💎  Welcome to @Library!

📝  Library of Ideas, Thoughts, Recommendations, Lessons, Reviews & Summary on various topics.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer.
And these the last verses that I write for her.

– Pablo Neruda

@Library

We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to make yourself feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste!

– Call Me by Your Name

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"Sing like no one’s listening, love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like nobody’s watching, and live like it’s heaven on earth."

– Mark Twain

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Dear Milena,

I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say:

"Come with me, Milena.
We are going to love each other
without scruples or fear or restraint.
Because the world is ending tomorrow."

Perhaps we don't love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time.

But what if we don't have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant?
Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow.
We could help each other very much.

– Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena.

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“Settle. Because otherwise you’re just gonna get older and harder, and more alone. And you’re gonna do everything you can to fill that hole, with friends, and your career, and meaningless sex, but the hole doesn’t get filled. One day, you’re gonna look around and you’re going to realize that everybody loves you, but nobody likes you. And that is the loneliest feeling in the world.”

– BoJack Horseman

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My father always said, “early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

It was lights out at 8 p.m. in our house and we were up at dawn to the smell of coffee, frying bacon and scrambled eggs.

My father followed this general routine for a lifetime and died young, broke, and, I think, not too wise.

Taking note, I rejected his advice and it became, for me, late to bed and late to rise.

Now, I’m not saying that I’ve conquered the world but I’ve avoided numberless early traffic jams, bypassed some common pitfalls and have met some strange, wonderful people.

One of whom was myself - someone my father never knew.

Throwing Away the Alarm Clock

– Charles Bukowski

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"It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?"

– Charles Bukowski

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“It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, “more like deer than human being.” To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.” 

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"Let's say that the consensus is that our species, we being the higher primates, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says 100,000, Richard Dawkins thinks a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000.

In order to be a Christian you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery.

All of that for 98,000 years, Heaven watches this with complete indifference. Then 2000 years ago, thinks, 'That's enough of that, it's time to intervene.' And the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't let's appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization - no, let's go to the desert and have another revelation there.

This is nonsense; it can't be believed by a thinking person."

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"After all this time?"

"Always"

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"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

– Cosmos, Carl Sagan

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The right people are timeless.

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"You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it - it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking... ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

@Library

I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

That there's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for.

– Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien

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I don't think that I've been in love as such, 
Although I liked a few folk pretty well. 
Love must be vaster than my smiles or touch, 
For brave men died and empires rose and fell 
For love: girls followed boys to foreign lands 
And men have followed women into Hell. 

In plays and poems someone understands 
There's something makes us more than blood and bone 
And more than biological demands... 
For me, love's like the wind, unseen, unknown. 
I see the trees are bending where it's been, 
I know that it leaves wreckage where it's blown. 
I really don't know what "I love you" means. 
I think it means "Don't leave me here alone."

– Sonnet, Neil Gaiman

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A thing about life, from Richard Dawkins:

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?"

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