Faustus: Stay, Mephistopheles, And Tell Me, What Good Willmy Soul Do Thy Lord?Mephistopheles: Enlarge

Faustus: Stay, Mephistopheles, and tell me, what good will my soul do thy lord? Mephistopheles: Enlarge his kingdom. Faustus: Is that the reason he tempts us thus? Mephistopheles: Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris. (It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery.)

Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus

@mvsicoftheniight

(via wholesomeobsessive)

“I refuse to pretend to be an angel. All right, I won’t stay here-I have to go back to the forest anyway. But we must be straightforward with the brothers. We’re asking them to elect a fallible, imperfect man, who will need their help and their prayers.” “Tell them that!” said Milius enthusiastically. “That’s perfect-they’ll love it.”

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett  (via wholesomeobsessive)

God is behind everything, but everything hides God. Things are black; creatures are opaque. To love a being is to render it transparent.

Victor Hugo’s draft of Les Miserables.

"Indeed, in later years I have come to set aside a portion of my guilt and shame and lay it at their door - for they meant no harm but did no good. I came into their hands naked and helpless, my mind an unwritten slate; what might I have been, in the hands of their betters?"

Melmoth, Sarah Perry

I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we’ve got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don’t we?

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees (via meadow-queen-main)

Consider the snow globe...

“Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful… Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyor belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors’ dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS driver carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and held it up to the light. When he looked through it, the planes were warped and caught in whirling snow.”

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven, 2014