No dogs, no biscuits … no love.

No dogs, no biscuits … no love.

m-onochrome

Always be reading.

Always be reading.

i-n-s-t-a-u-r-a-d-o

We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute – the foundation of the human condition – and should be better. We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
Mario Vargas Llosa
Cutest thing I’ve seen all week.

Cutest thing I’ve seen all week.

yanidanaee

Daunt Books in London. I’ve got to visit this shop someday.

“You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I’ve read a book, I don’t feel like I’ve finished anything. So I start a new one.” ― Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul

“You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I’ve read a book, I don’t feel like I’ve finished anything. So I start a new one.” ― Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul

steampunktime:

I think hidden rooms accessed via secret passage bookshelves are the ultimate in Steampunk interior decor. This is Secret Passage Bookshelf Porn. Enjoy!

  1. Library with secret door from Stash Vault
  2. Revolving shelf unit by Eckelman Brothers Construction
  3. In The Vortex
  4. A secret bookcase door in the library leads to the wine cellar from Su Casa Southern Homes
  5. A hidden stash with a secret door from Quinn Creative 
  6. A Secret Passage Door via Happiness Is
  7. Drool-Worthy Secret Passage Bookshelves via Book Riot
  8. Holly Black’s Hidden Library
  9. Kick-Ass Secret Passage Bookshelves
  10. Your One-Stop Shop for Hidden Stairways and Secret Crypts via Archinect 
I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.
Dorothy Parker; The Collected Dorothy Parker

theparisreview:

“Of course, [baseball]’s both: a sport and a pastime, to borrow from James Salter. The autograph hounds in Ivan Weiss’s trailer, the voyeurism that unsettles our photographer Kate Joyce, and that peculiar alone-in-the-crowd feeling that haunts [photographer Alec] Soth—none of that arises without the ballgames themselves. There’s a reason A Sport and a Pastime is so full of sex, described in elaborate, ritual detail: Salter understood that the strenuous, disciplined, daily exertions of love—the physical sport—enabled and ennobled the pastime of the life around it. The sex had to be closely observed and recorded.”

In the latest installment of the Bull City Summer series, Adam Sobsey on when baseball isn’t baseball.

A lost journal of W. H. Auden, one of three that the poet is known to have kept, has recently been discovered.

millionsmillions

robotmonkeys-net: “The library of the monastery of St. Florian in Upper Austria. It is a baroque jewel, and includes about 140,000 volumes. In the library are many valuable medieval manuscripts and early printed books.” de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stift_Sankt_Florian Bibliothek in St. Florian by dorena-wm http://flic.kr/p/8mpTfv

robotmonkeys-net:

“The library of the monastery of St. Florian in Upper Austria. It is a baroque jewel, and includes about 140,000 volumes. In the library are many valuable medieval manuscripts and early printed books.” de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stift_Sankt_Florian

Bibliothek in St. Florian by dorena-wm http://flic.kr/p/8mpTfv

theparisreview: “Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.”―Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway,” published on this day in 1925

theparisreview:

“Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.”

―Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway,” published on this day in 1925

A little piece of heaven.

A little piece of heaven.

Flickr / rightreading

You’ve gotta dance like there’s nobody watching,
Love like you’ll never be hurt,
Sing like there’s nobody listening,
And live like it’s heaven on earth.
William W. Purkey
Unhappy as we are (and we would be less so if there were no element of greatness in our condition) we have an idea of happiness but we cannot attain it. We perceive an image of the truth and possess nothing but falsehood, being equally incapable of absolute ignorance and certain knowledge.
Blaise Pascal, Human Happiness (via distantheartbeats)