“The strongest wish in her being at this moment was to be able to do something for the unhappy people — to see them — to assure them — to help them.”
— Virginia Woolf,The Voyage Out.
(Source: fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
May 07, 2012, 7:56pm Comments
Superposition is the answer
(Source: rhea137)
March 30, 2012, 4:29pm Comments
Stanford neuroscientists host the world’s first love competition, asking contestants between the ages of 10 and 75 to spend 5 minutes in an fMRI machine thinking deeply about the person they love. The results are certain to bring a tear to your eye.
Complementary reading: 5 essential books on the psychology of love.
this is beautiful
March 09, 2012, 4:08pm Comments
dystopiantimes:Sneha Solanki, ‘The Lovers’. Two networked machines, one infected with a virus, slowly infects the other through the interface of classic romantic poetry.
this piece is so sad forever
(Source: gonetocroatoan)
March 08, 2012, 10:32am Comments
“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment…’dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love — which is to transform us.’ Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.”
— bell hooks
(Source: revolutionnow)
February 29, 2012, 8:38am Comments
In 1936, in the midst of an unrelenting workload and the near-demise of his marriage, legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams suffered a nervous breakdown. After a stay in hospital, desperately in need of escape, Adams then returned with his family to the one place where he could find solace: Yosemite, California.
Some months later, as his health returned, he wrote the following beautiful letter to his best friend, Cedric Wright.
June 19, 1937
Dear Cedric,
A strange thing happened to me today. I saw a big thundercloud move down over Half Dome, and it was so big and clear and brilliant that it made me see many things that were drifting around inside of me; things that related to those who are loved and those who are real friends.
For the first time I know what love is; what friends are; and what art should be.
Love is a seeking for a way of life; the way that cannot be followed alone; the resonance of all spiritual and physical things. Children are not only of flesh and blood — children may be ideas, thoughts, emotions. The person of the one who is loved is a form composed of a myriad mirrors reflecting and illuminating the powers and thoughts and the emotions that are within you, and flashing another kind of light from within. No words or deeds may encompass it.
Friendship is another form of love — more passive perhaps, but full of the transmitting and acceptance of things like thunderclouds and grass and the clean granite of reality.
Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.
I wish the thundercloud had moved up over Tahoe and let loose on you; I could wish you nothing finer.
Ansel
February 15, 2012, 12:17am Comments
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
(Source: liquidnight)
February 13, 2012, 11:47pm Comments
oh Andy Partridge, you hit the nail on the head.
“it’s a lack of love song”
XTC - All of a Sudden (It’s Too Late)
What can I say?
Why do we starve a thing thats near extinction?
From day to day,
These weeds of fear,
Are choking our conviction,
Life’s like a jig-saw,
you get the straight bits,
But there’s something missing in the middle.
All of a sudden,
We find the cupboard’s bare.
All of a sudden,
We find heaven’s not there.
All of a sudden,
We find the sun’s gone cold.
All of a sudden
We find we’re more than old.
All of a sudden,
We find that we’ve lost love,
So please don’t push or shove because,
It’s too late,
It’s too late,
In all your hurry you’ve accidentally locked the gate.
What can we do?
Trying to stem the flow of sand is useless.
It’s up to you to start holding hands,
And watch the balance redress,
Life’s like a firework,
You’re only lit once,
And you must stand and radiate correctly.
January 25, 2012, 11:00pm Comments
“Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
— C.S. Lewis
January 18, 2012, 11:36pm Comments
“Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.”
— Virginia Woolf, Montaigne. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
January 03, 2012, 9:19am Comments
Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:
“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.
So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”
We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.
And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.
It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”- from Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live
oops now i’m crying
gilda gilda gilda gilda
how people show you they love you.
beautiful (in tears)
January 01, 2012, 11:15am Comments
“These monogamy chemicals combine the fundamental, biological drive to mate with the euphoria of dopamine and focus all that attention on the prairie vole’s lucky partner. When researchers block the monogamy chemicals, the voles become promiscuous. When the chemicals are present, the cocktail proves a powerful combination—one that creates the chemical conditions for love.
You can’t fake it, though. When researchers injected oxytocin and vasopressin into the faithful vole’s promiscuous cousin, the montane vole, nothing happened. The philandering voles didn’t have receptors in their brains to receive the monogamy chemicals. Humans, however, possess both the chemicals and the receptors. Variations in the quantity and location of receptors, scientists say, may account for some people staying more monogamous than others. Our capacity for enduring love, it seems, is rooted in the physiology of our brains.
***
Fisher and Aron call love a “goal state,” closely linked with addictions. Unlike emotions, which can flare, a goal state requires a stable yearning for something—for warmth when you’re cold or a hit if you’re an addict. It’s a state that drives us continually until we can satiate our appetites.
”
—
Love and heartbreak as brain chemistry. Some day, it may be possible for heartbreak to be treated medically. I need my medicine.
(via gainfulunemployment)
As traumatic as it is I wouldn’t want to live in a world without heartbreak. It can make us grow and change in important ways.
December 27, 2011, 9:29pm Comments
