Reading In Bed. Painting By Marta Astrain.

paul and the lovely linda 🕊️

I just want to create a beautiful life for myself and others. I want peace and quiet in my house in the mountains, a garden filled with blooming flowers and happy cats. Sunkissed mornings on a white porch enjoying a slow morning routine, with a cup of black tea in dainty floral teacups, vintage 50s music drifting from the kitchen along with the scent of pancakes & homemade jam. A house that smells like home, like fresh bread, like serenity. A hall filled with art in beautiful ornate frames. The freedom to create what I love and share it with others. I will create my own kind of happiness and I truly believe everybody deserves to create for themselves whatever life offers them the most happiness.

She had created a dream world for herself. If the slightest thing happened in the normal world which did not conform to the laws of her dream world, her heart rose up in outrage and she was in pain.

Ivan Goncharov, The Same Old Story (1847)

— Franz Kafka, Letter to his father

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question.

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect, 1961.

"The Brothers Karamazov", Fyodor Dostoevsky (translated by Constance Garnett)

I love the idea of jewelry being passed down in a family. The stories that it tells, the bodies that have worn them. I find it so simple yet so pure.

Anaïs Nin, from the diary of Anais Nin, vol. VI: 1955-1966