E.J.

"Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more."

Come with me, as if I were dying

And no one saw the moon that bled in my mouth.

-Neruda

A worthy representation of how I felt on Saturday afternoon.

It was a paradisiacal two hours.

O.G. Rejlander

Thanks, Pally.

Vivien Leigh is the most beautiful. She weakens my knees.

Anna Karenina.

Observation

Certain people have consistently pleasant countenances. These folks always look as if they just finished smelling a huge bouquet of flowers after dismounting their unicorn. I marvel at them and can't help but wonder if beneath their serene expressions a simmering vat of anger and violence brews. As someone whose natural face is a scowl and whose insides are almost always close to bursting with happiness, it never ceases to startle and delight me when I see these mysterious people.

My beautiful boy.

Camus

"I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing."

Happiest

"The fact that you got a little happier today doesn't change the fact that you also became a little sadder. Everyday you become a little more of both, which means that right now, at this exact moment, you're the happiest and saddest you've ever been in your whole life." –Krauss

If you know me for more than 90 minutes, you know my affinity for bathtubs. This one nearly brought me to tears.

Jean Seberg

I'm Breathless.

Hello, fantasy.

J.M.C.

"His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lies in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul."

Coetzee

One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation.

Waiting for the Barbarians

N.

I have been thinking of my grandmother today. Her eyes were brown and flecked with green. They held everything. Only certain people could see the green. I am realizing now that’s what I said I saw in your eyes that day when you asked me if I was just making it up so you would feel special.

I wasn’t, by the way.

Shai

Paul Newman, how you affect us.

Dita in McQueen

I have learned

"I have learned not to think little of any one's belief, no matter how strange it may be. I have tried to keep an open mind, and it is not the ordinary things of life that could close it, but the strange things, the extraordinary things, the things that make one doubt if they be mad or sane."

— Bram Stoker

Language is desire

"Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange."

Death

A DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY

Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children.

"Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out."

A life larger

The floorboards creaked under my weight. There were books everywhere. There were pens, and a blue glass vase, an ashtray from the Dolder Grand in Zurich, the rusted arrow of a weather vane, a little brass hourglass, sand dollars on the windowsill, a pair of binoculars, an empty wine bottle that served as a candle holder, wax melted down the neck. I touched this thing and that. At the end, all that's left of you are your possessions. Perhaps that's why I've never been able to throw anything away. Perhaps that's why I hoarded the world: with the hope that when I died, the sum total of my things would suggest a life larger than the one I lived. -Krauss

"A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us."

Slow man

"He seems to be on the brink of one of his bad spells again, one of the fits of lugubrious self-pity that turn into black gloom. He likes to think that they comes from elsewhere, episodes of bad weather that cross the sky and pass on. He prefers not to think they come from inside him and are his, part of him...

Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light."

-Coetzee

Franz Kafka is Dead

He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children's hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers' shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn't wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees , Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind.

That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children wake up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone.

They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It's said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves."

-N.K.

Krauss

"Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist, there are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges and absorbs the impact."

Judy as a child.

Fabulous even then.

Forgiveness

"Melt him into repentance and friendship. Heap coals of fire on his head. Those that revenge are the conquered and those that forgive are the conquerors." -Matthew Henry

I have seen your heart.

I am probably going to just scream/sob through this entire film.

Rereading will commence shortly.

Two Women

Sophia Loren & Eleonora Brown in Two Women (1960, dir. Vittorio de Sica)

“I am basically an unhappy man. Life gives me always the impression of cruelty. I read the newspaper - crimes, murders, divorces, and so on. I do not find evidence of sincerity or solidarity there. I love humanity, I trust humanity, but humanity has a way of disillusioning me. The pictures I direct are nearly always melancholy. This comes from the contrast between my love and my disillusion. I am an optimist. I love life. I seek perfection. If my art seems pessimistic, it is a consequence of my continuing optimism and its disillusion.”

-Vittorio de Sica, New Yorker, June 1957

Tilda Swinton

The infatuation does not wane.

Children Of Paradise (Les enfants du paradis)

Robed in shades of poetic realism, this utterly beautiful film was directed by Marcel Carne and written by Jacques Prévert.

Edith Head

During her half-century in Hollywood, costume designer Edith Head worked on more than a thousand films. Here are some of her best—each as timeless as Head’s creations. For more on her legendary career and photographs of her stylish ensembles—not to mention her own Coldwater Canyon hacienda—see the October issue of Veranda. And don’t miss the photo-filled book Edith Head: The Fifty-Year Career of Hollywood’s Greatest Costume Designer by Jay Jorgensen, new from Running Press.

Double Indemnity (1944): The film noir classic stars Barbara Stanwyck as a murderous femme fatale opposite a gullible Fred MacMurray. Stanwyck and Head would eventually work together on more than twenty-five films.

All About Eve (1950): Bette Davis plays a Broadway star upstaged by a young fan. This blockbuster was nominated for fourteen Oscars—more than Gone With the Wind—and won six, including best picture. Head won, too.

Sunset Boulevard (1950): Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond, the aging silent-screen goddess dressed for excess, waits for her career to rebound. And waits…. Head and the actress conceptualized the clothes together.

A Place in the Sun (1951): Elizabeth Taylor as a society debutante dazzles. So does her strapless white gown, tulle-skirted with velvet violets on the bodice—copied and worn by prom-going teenagers across America.

Roman Holiday (1953): In the role of a modern princess who escapes constraints, Audrey Hepburn motors around the Eternal City with Gregory Peck in casual and carefree clothes that play up her gamine charm.

Rear Window (1954): Working with Alfred Hitchcock, Head dresses Grace Kelly as a fashionable New York socialite in preppy outfits that are the height of propriety—and surprisingly sexy.

To Catch a Thief (1955): Watch for Grace Kelly’s blue chiffon gown, white strapless number and gold lamé extravaganza. The beach ensemble, including black capri pants with a white overskirt, would look chic today. Cary Grant enjoys the views—and not just of the Côte d’Azur.

The Birds (1963): Alfred Hitchcock’s flocks and Head’s frocks. For Tippi Hedren’s tailored look, the designer selected wool that could easily be snagged. Both impeccable and peck-able.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969): Raindrops couldn’t keep fallin’ on Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s heads—as bank robbers, they wore everything from a fedora to a derby to a cowboy hat, all at Edith’s behest. Katharine Ross had a tricky time in a long, billowy dress as she perched on the handlebars of a bicycle while Butch pedaled—and peddled his charms.

The Sting (1973): Paul Newman and Robert Redford reunite, this time as small-time con men. Redford’s dashing haberdashery brings back the chalk-striped suit. The movie wins best picture, and septuagenarian Edith takes home her eighth Oscar.

http://www.veranda.com/luxury-homes/veranda-favorite-edith-head-films

Marcel Proust

"In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be."

The bottom is out of the Universe.

We had a kettle; we let it leak:
Our not repairing made it worse.
We haven't had any tea for a week...
The bottom is out of the Universe.
~Rudyard Kipling

What it is.

"Desire is like an open-ended anvil. It can pound you out. Desire for something can alter your mind, desire for someone can wrench your guts. This is how I began to know I was becoming attached. I could feel my guts start to throb. How a subconscious pull to him stretched from my spine through my stomach and out into a dark hooked oblivion wherever he was holding the end. I searched for him amid stacks of books. He read me as pages. Fingers spelling, skin taut across the bone. His hands were always in my hair. My hands always in her hair. I wanted to feel her skull taut against my hand. I wanted to press into her. As pen to paper. My need to swallow every fistful of her that I could shove inside made it triumphant to give her my eyes and my fingertips—the emptied place where the loneliness lay. It was mostly time. Time arching over everything. In a world so governed by ticking, of a life so turned on its ear to the hum of obligation; she was an emptied tree. Rooted, dark and mournful. That hollow place. She had been gutted and I resided in the space. I could scarcely know what half her pain tasted like, or to think of feeling it, I could not. She walked like a parade; a battalion of men in orderly rows. She talked like an old woman. I need to tell you how she talks. Cracking vase in a room of tin. Brain burning as I watched her mouth. Inside I could feel a rock."

I am the remnants of wars I never fought.