Ginger Magnum

"I live in my dreams—that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That’s the difference." Hermann Hesse, Demian

"Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." -  Ralph Waldo Emerson

Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call. Go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone, don’t wait for them to give you a sign because it might never come. Don’t let people happen to you, don’t let me happen to you, or her, she’s not a fucking television show or tornado. There are people I might have loved had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning because they need to tell me right now and because they cannot regret this and I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back or to act like idiots or be entirely vulnerable and honest and making someone fall in love with you is easy and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can’t just sit there and do nothing and breathe into telephones is not everyone’s idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do. Go scream it and be wi

Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will. But we’ve drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we’ve got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. — Ray Bradbury,  Something Wicked This Way Comes

Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal. Fernando Pessoa, from the Preface of The Book of Disquiet ,

I’d woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist. —  Fernando Pessoa,  The Book of Disquiet

"..not all those who wander are lost;..." J.R.R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings

"If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it."     C.S.LEWIS

"I had escaped between the mountains and into the soil like a whisper on a soft breath. And though the wind did not pick me up, the fields of wheat washed at my knees." .Georgie Whots, On Gray Seas                                                                                                                                                                        

"The soul aids the body, and at certain moments raises it. It is the only bird which bears up its own cage." Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

"I had to remind myself again, try not to think."    Charles Bukowski, Factotum

" I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion." -WALDEN, Henry David Thoreau

'It is not part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious. ’  -  Henry David Thoreau

"It was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything." JOSEPH HELLER ,  CATCH-22

The thing about this bookshelf is that each of these books is a vast experience unto itself, while also being both self-contained and superbly useless. Reading any one of them doesn’t get you anywhere particularly meaningful; you haven’t arrived or graduated; you’ve just gone and done something that passes the time. It’s like taking a long walk with a friend who’s got a lot to say. There’s no cumulative purpose to it — it’s just an excellent way to waste your life. JONATHAN LETHEM

In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps As all they might have done had they been loved. “ ” from "Faith Healing" (1960), Phillip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. “ ” from "Aubade" (1977), Phillip Larkin

"Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth," -Phillip Larkin