→ May 2012 "I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more." — Maurice Sendak on Fresh Air in 2011 [all interviews with Sendak here] (via nprfreshair)

(via seaembraces)

→ May 2012 "If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be." — Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (via maxrecords)

(via dailyloveliness)

→ May 2012 "My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of ‘Gone With the Wind’, and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It’s actually one of the things that you live and die for." — Neil Gaiman  (via rookiemag)

(Source: jaynestown, via noseinabook)

→ May 2012 "Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness." — Yousuf Karsh  (via thatkindofwoman)

(Source: tedmaximilian, via thatkindofwoman)

→ May 2012 "What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." — Carl Sagan   (via foxmouth)

(Source: fleurishes, via foxmouth)