#natur

I was aware that we were both silently making those inevitable comparisons, putting our relationship in context. She is more this and less that. He is better or worse in these ways. It is human nature to do this--unless its your first relationship, which might be the very reason that your first relationship feels special and remains forever sacred. But the older you get, the more cynical you become, and the more complicated and convoluted the exercise is. You begin to realize that nothing is perfect, that there are trade-offs and sacrifices. The worst is when someone in your past trumps the person in the present, and you think to yourself: if I'd known this, then maybe I wouldn't have let him go. ↗

— Emily Giffin

#relationships #sacrifice #nature

Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it. ↗

— Michel Faber

#society #nature

Finally, a bit of luck. Rat bastard,” I hissed down at Montmartre. “Mangy dog of a scurvy goat.” “That doesn’t even make sense,” Isabeau murmured. “Feels good though. Try it.” She narrowed her eyes at the top of Montmartre’s perfectly groomed hair. “Balding donkey’s ass. “ “Nice.” “Sniveling flea-bitten rabid monkey droppings.” “Clearly, you’re a natural. ↗

— Alyxandra Harvey

#logan #swearing #nature

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#writers #writing #nature

To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#nature

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history! ↗

— Charles Lamb

#nature

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.' That's a rather broad idea,' I remarked. One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,' he answered. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#music #nature #sherlock-holmes #watson #music

And then it was, that grief and pain made themselves known to me as never before. Note this, because I knew the full absurdity of Fate and Fortune and Nature more truly than a human can bear to know it. And perhaps the description of this, brief as it is, may give consolation to another. The worst takes its time to come, and then to pass. The truth is, you cannot prepare anyone for this, nor convey an understanding of it through language. It must be known. And this I would wish on no one in the world. ↗

— Anne Rice

#pain #nature

Come, you spirits That tend on mortal thoughts! Unsex me here, And fill me from the crown to the toe top full Of direst cruelty; make thick my blood, Stop up the access and passage to remorse, That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, Wherever in your sightless substances You wait on nature’s mischief! Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry "Hold, hold! ↗

— William Shakespeare

#scene-v #nature

There are so many ways of being despicable it quite makes one’s head spin. But the way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people’s pain. ↗

— James Baldwin

#nature