"She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside."

- Jeffrey Eugenides

Photography quotes.

"The unconscious obsession that we photographers have is that wherever we go we want to find the theme that we carry inside ourselves."

—Graciela Iturbide

"We photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory."

-Henri Cartier Bresson

Honest Abe.

Via ShopTalk

What sort of diary should I like mine to be?

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

(via Even*Cleveland)

Quoteable

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race" - the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

- Excerpt from David Foster Wallace's speech at Kenyon College in 2005; read the whole thing here: http://bit.ly/sUCD8

Quoteable.

"We need your service, right now, at this moment in history. I'm not going to tell you what your role should be; that's for you to discover. But I'm asking you to stand up and play your part. I'm asking you to help change history's course."

President Barack Obama, April 21, 2009
Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act signing ceremony

Quoteable.

"I can’t think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can’t talk to, or worse, someone I can’t be silent with."

“The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.” Read it. Immediately.