#or

The Winter Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help me discover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me what constituted that thread which drew me toward Photography. I had understood that henceforth I must interrogate the evidence of Photography, not from the viewpoint of pleasure, but in relation to what we romantically call love and death. ↗

— Roland Barthes

#photography #understanding #death

Now if a man thus favoured died as he has lived, he will be just the one you are looking for: the only sort of person who deserves to be called happy. But mark this: until he is dead, keep the word "happy" in reserve. Till then, he is not happy, but only lucky... ↗

— Herodotus

#happy #herodotus #history #life #lucky

Those of us who have seen violent death up close, who have seen what high-powered bullets can do to living human tissue, have a horror of inflicting that nightmarish, never forgotten damage on a fellow human being. Perhaps the only more terrifying prospect is that such a fate should befall us or our loved ones. This is why we, a representative cross-section of America's population, keep deadly weapons for personal defense. ↗

— Massad Ayoob

#lethal-force #regret #responsibility #death

In love! She wafted through her day like a woman with a concussion. ↗

— Junot Díaz

#love #love

How can love's spaciousness be conveyed in the narrow confines of one syllable? ↗

— Diane Ackerman

#poetry #words #love

...Where we got to know eachother. Not just with words, it was how we observed eachother's movements. The way your smile only effected the lower half of your face. How our hands moved when they were close: as if they had minds of their own. ↗

— Elaine Turnbo

#love-story #love

Startled, she said, “Oh, I thought you were somebody else.” “No,” I said, “I’m not somebody else—but my clone is.”
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#fright #funny #humor #people #relationships

His voice was oily and slick as it poured from his mouth like liquid acid, threatening to hook onto the woman's hair like a fishing hook and drag her back to death. ↗

— Stephen Craig

#death #disturbing #horror #killer #death

There must be some kind of internal time distortion effect in here, because when I look at myself in the little mirror above my sink, what I see is my father's face, my face turning into his. I am beginning to feel how the man looked, especially how he looked on those nights he came home so tired he couldn't even make it through dinner without nodding off, sitting there with his bowl of soup cooling in front of him, a rich pork-and-winter-melon-saturated broth that, moment by moment, was losing - or giving up - its tiny quantum of heat into the vast average temperature of the universe. ↗

— Charles Yu

#mirror #quantum-of-heat #soup #tiredness #home

The actuality of us being cognizant and accepting of the fact we are but a speck of sand in a universe sized desert, whose existence is irrelevant to any facet of universal function is a hard pill to swallow. Knowing the world will go on for another billion years after death and you will have no recollection of anything, just as you have no recollection of the billion years before your birth is a mind-boggling intuition, ↗

— Hewitt E. Moore

#life #noremorse #philosophy #universe #death