Hed Fallen In Love Slowly And Quietly, And It Was A Quiet Sort Of Love, Full Of Phrases Left Unsaid,

“He’d fallen in love slowly and quietly, and it was a quiet sort of love, full of phrases left unsaid, laced with dreams.”

— Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Gods of Jade and Shadow

Reluctantly, he knew that he despised his fellow residents for the way in which they fit so willingly into their appointed slots in the apartment buildings, for their overdeveloped sense of responsibility and lack of flamboyance. Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste. The building was a monument to good taste, to the well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utencils and fabrics, to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings. In short, to that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated, professional people had inherited from all the schools of industrial design, all the award-winning schemes of interior decoration institutionalized by the last quarter of the century. Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbors’ apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee pot, but the well-modulated color schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture, and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape.

High-Rise by J. G. Ballard (via wholesomeobsessive)

…we cannot conceive that as we grow up our own minds will become so enlarged and elevated that we ourselves shall then regard as trifling those objects and pursuits we now so fondly cherish.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Brontë (via wholesomeobsessive)

And write a deed of gift with thine owe blood,

Mephistophilis, Dr. Faustus, Act 2 Scene 1 (via wholesomeobsessive)

Choice, it seemed, was one of the first casualties of war.

Kate Atkinson, Transcription (via quoted-books)

from art objects: essays in ecstasy and effrontery, which is an undeniably great title.