February 2012
11 posts
A stone thrown into a silent lake
is—the sound of your name.
The light click...
– Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Poems for Blok, 1,” trans. Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine (via proustitute)
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets...
– Anna Akhmatova, from “A land not mine, still” (translated by Jane Kenyon)
My question - that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide...
– Leo Tolstoy in A Confession (1882)
Who was it that took away my voice?
The black wound he left in my throat
Can’t...
– Bella Akhmadulina, from “Silence” (translated by Daniel Halpern) (via ekphora)
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I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and...
– Leo Tolstoy (via davisbecca)
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And so they met- like wave with mountain,
Like verse with prose, like flame...
– Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin (via i-starchild)
January 2012
13 posts
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The tiny space I occupy is so infinitesimal in comparison with the rest of...
– Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (via tellhimtoshrug)
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Her Lover, Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), “Her Lover” —... →
modorraburlesca:
Bolês, Górki
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My jests, gentlemen, are of course in bad taste, jerky, involved, lacking...
– Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via calculatedlogicalandalone)
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I Don't Know If You're Alive Or Dead by Anna...
toniiu:
I don’t know if you’re alive or dead. Can you on earth be sought, Or only when the sunsets fade Be mourned serenely in my thought? All is for you: the daily prayer, The sleepless heat at night, And of my verses, the white Flock, and of my eyes, the blue fire. No-one was more cherished, no-one tortured Me more, not Even the one who betrayed me to torture, Not even the one who caressed me...
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December 2011
8 posts
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We must trust people. Otherwise life is impossible.
– Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya (via beautysaflower)
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In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by...
– Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)
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She saw flashes of genius in every passing remark, in the puns he was forever...
– Susan Sontag on Joseph Brodsky in Sigrid Nunez, Sempre Susan (2011).
Oh Joseph, I’m with you on this Tolstoy business. He was such a bore.
(via foxpass)
November 2011
11 posts
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Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that.
– The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (via freins)
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If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in...
– Anton Chekhov (via thelibraryharlot)
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I am a bug, and I recognize in all humility that I cannot understand why the...
– Ivan Karamazov, The Brothers Karamazov (via hells-bells-trudy)
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October 2011
21 posts
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For them, everything seethes, and their peace does not look like yours. They...
– Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (via smrosie)
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…could he have been born from the start
If only for a fleeting moment
To...
– Ivan Turgenev
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