Ambiguity, Amphiboly, and Amphigorey Too

"Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth. You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them."

(via thelarkarising)

"He would wake from sleep to miss the weight that never depressed the bed next to him, remember in earnest the weight of gestures she never made, long for the un-weight of her un-arm slung over his too real chest."

(via thelarkarising)

"In 1915, in Geneva, I avidly read Crime and Punishment in the very readable version by Constance Garnett. That novel, whose heroes are a murderer and a prostitute, seemed to me no less atrocious than the war that surrounded us. I imagined at the time that Dostoyevsky was a kind of great unfathomable God, capable of understanding and justifying all beings. I was astonished that he had occasionally descended to mere politics, that he discriminated and condemned.

To read a book by Dostoyevsky is to penetrate a great city unknown to us, or the shadow of a battle. Crime and Punishment revealed to me, among other things, a world different from my own. When I read Demons, something very strange occurred. I felt that I had returned home. The steppes were a magnification of the pampas. Varvara Petrovna and Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky were, despite their unwieldy names, old irresponsible Argentines. The book began with joy, as if the narrator did not know its tragic end.

In the preface to an anthology of Russian literature, Vladimir Nabokov stated that he had not found a single page of Dostoyevsky worthy of inclusion. This ought to mean that Dostoyevsky should not be judged by each page but rather by the total of all the pages that comprise the book."

(via booklover)