Think'st Thou That I, Who Saw The Face Of God,And Tasted The Eternal Joys Of Heaven,Am Not Tormented

Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss!

Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus (via wholesomeobsessive)

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

Kate Atkinson, Transcription (via quoted-books)

“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)

Oh, I’ll leap up to my God. Who pulls me down?

The tragedy of Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe (via wholesomeobsessive)

I had decided early on that if I couldn’t dress elegant, I’d dress memorable.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees (via awellreadwoman)