“Ever since I could remember, I had feared being found wanting. If I did the work I wanted to do, it was certain not to measure up; if I pursued the people I wanted to know, I was bound to be rejected; if I made myself as attractive as I could, I would still be ordinary looking. Around such damages to the ego a shrinking psyche had formed: I applied myself to my work, but only grudgingly; I’d make one move toward people I liked, but never two; I wore makeup but dressed badly. To do any or all of these things well would have been to engage heedlessly with life — love it more than I loved my fears — and this I could not do. What I could do, apparently, was daydream the years away: to go on yearning for “things” to be different so that I would be different.”
— Vivian Gornick, The Cost of Daydreaming - NYTimes.com (via arabellesicardi)
Dreamy guestroom in interior designer Howard Slatkin’s Fifth Avenue apartment [x]
sometimes I think about the sculptors hands that moulded and formed the statues and then I touch the cold stone and I feel our hands meet through time and space
“What a generous thought. That you are already what you’ve always wanted to be, and all you have to do is let go of the parts that are keeping you from that. But letting go is so terribly hard. I admit I have tried everyday. All the time. I want to let go. It’s not that I’m still holding on– it’s holding on to me.”
— marsarchives (via wnq-writers)
“Boredom is different nowadays. It’s about super-saturation, distraction, restlessness. I am often bored but it’s not for lack of options: a thousand TV channels, the bounty of Netflix, countless net radio stations, innumerable unlistened-to albums, unwatched DVDs and unread books, the maze-like archive of YouTube. Today’s boredom is not hungry, a response to deprivation; it is a loss of cultural appetite, in response to the surfeit of claims on your attention and time.”
— Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past