mmagarosa

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Waking Up, 1895 by Federico Zandomeneghi (Italian, 1841--1917)

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“And she remained in his memory simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.”

The Age of Innocence (1993) dir. Martin Scorsese

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“When Dante Gabriel Rossetti read the novel Wuthering Heights, he wrote to a friend: “The action takes place in Hell, but the places, I don’t know why, have English names.””

— Jorge Luis Borges, “Julio Cortazar, Stories” from Prologues to a Personal Library.

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I am becoming more and more firmly convinced that art is the only thing that matters in life.

— Vladimir Nabokov, Letters to Véra

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Virginia Woolf, from Orlando: A Biography

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(literature girl summer) we're back to finishing a book in two days

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Boston Post, Massachusetts, April 24, 1904 

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Charlotte Brontë, from “Jane Eyre”

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The first two years of writing a story is just Thinking™️

#the next two years is just thinking how to fix what you thought during the previous two

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everyone talks a lot about suffering and despair as it pertains to Dostoevsky’s work which is totally fair and understandable given the subject matter but I rarely see discussion of how deeply and sacredly tender the end of C&P is. I think there’s a very important lesson to be learned which is that you do not unilaterally get to decide that you are horrid beyond redemption and unworthy of love, no matter what horrible things you’ve done. Sonya and Razumikhin and Dunya do not abandon Rodya as he thinks they should and in fact they uproot their entire lives to make sure there will still be a place for him in the world when he gets out of prison. Other people have free will and they can use that free will to unconditionally love and forgive you and there’s nothing you can do about that, whether you choose to receive it or not so you may as well receive it- even if you feel unworthy. And that is like the very beginning of hope and coming back from the place of no return. Is letting yourself be loved. And letting yourself be loved—- even if you don’t feel that you deserve it—- opens the gateway to experiencing love for others yourself after a prolonged period of cutting yourself off from feeling those feelings of positive regard. It’s a stream that flows both ways. And it doesn’t change any of the horrifying facts about the past. But it makes it possible to begin to live again.

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Just a girl, wrapped in a blanket, with the wind whistling and the rain storming outside, doing her research for her thesis, in a paratextual friendship with twenty-years-old Mary Shelley she will never know about because we are two centuries apart

#am i okay #mary shelley #dark academia #i don't know the target audience for this post #am i very emotional about this the answer is yes

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ok wait, reblog if you’ve cried at least once because of math, doesn’t matter which grade i’m trying to prove something 

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when you know exactly how you want a scene to go but as soon as you sit down to write it you are suddenly staring at some of the worst sentences mankind has ever strung together.

#this was a little bit too on time to be casually on the timeline

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i literally say “i love virginia woolf” out loud at least 6 times a day. i’m making eggs and i’ll just be like “man...virginia woolf was right.” ABOUT WHAT?? all of it.

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january is one of those months where you experience every feeling on the human spectrum and you just have to go about your day like that isn't happening

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Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka