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The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.
2:13am with 27 notes
Reblogged from merryweather
(via merryweather)
Happy birthday, Virginia Woolf: patron saint, head of the pantheon, marvelous beast.
(photo by Barbara Strachey, 1938)
from “Ink in the Blood”
Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defenses are knocked down in one sweep. In sickness we can’t avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands. We see things that never should be seen; our inside is outside, the body’s sewer pipes and vaults exposed to view, as if in a woodcut of our own martyrdom. The whole of life – the business of moving an inch – requires calculation.
Hilary Mantel
Jan. 20, 2012 at 7:29pm with 37 notes
Reblogged from mythologyofblue
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I have tried hard — but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.
