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Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers. ~ Margaret Atwood

But sometimes being human also means pressing your ear to the pavement and listening to the rumor of something far away, something that belongs to all of us, something that might give us enough soul or enough courage, something we take secondhand and build on.

Kara VanderBijl, from “The Second-Handers” (via the-final-sentence)
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imgfave:

★ discovered on imgfave.com (social image bookmarking)

imgfave: ★ discovered on imgfave.com (social image bookmarking)

fishingboatproceeds:

As you may know, I am suspicious of epiphanies, but I can never quite reject the possibility of lasting epiphany. 

I was thinking about this today while rereading a book by Richard Powers, one of my favorite novelists. Powers was working as a computer programmer in the early 1980s when he saw this August Sander photograph, Young Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 1914. (The dance in question, of course, turned out to be World War I.)

Powers’s first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, was published in 1985. Powers said this about encountering the photograph in a 2003 interview with Powers in The Paris Review:

“I had this palpable sense of recognition, this feeling that I was walking into their gaze, and they’d been waiting seventy years for someone to return the gaze. I went up to the photograph and read the caption and had this instant realization that not only were they not on the way to the dance, but that somehow I had been reading about this moment for the last year and a half. Everything I read seemed to converge onto this act of looking, this birth of the twentieth century—the age of total war, the age of the apotheosis of the machine, the age of mechanical reproduction. That was a Saturday. On Monday I went in to my job and gave two weeks notice and started working on Three Farmers.”

fishingboatproceeds: As you may know, I am suspicious of epiphanies, but I can never quite reject the possibility of lasting epiphany.  I was thinking about this today while rereading a book by Richard Powers, one of my favorite novelists. Powers was working as a computer programmer in the early 1980s when he saw this August Sander photograph, Young Westerwald Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 1914. (The dance in question, of course, turned out to be World War I.) Powers’s first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, was published in 1985. Powers said this about encountering the photograph in a 2003 interview with Powers in The Paris Review: “I had this palpable sense of recognition, this feeling that I was walking into their gaze, and they’d been waiting seventy years for someone to return the gaze. I went up to the photograph and read the caption and had this instant realization that not only were they not on the way to the dance, but that somehow I had been reading about this moment for the last year and a half. Everything I read seemed to converge onto this act of looking, this birth of the twentieth century—the age of total war, the age of the apotheosis of the machine, the age of mechanical reproduction. That was a Saturday. On Monday I went in to my job and gave two weeks notice and started working on Three Farmers.”

The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up inside him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn’t over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you in the very quick and quiet way that she had always said it. She said I love you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.

An Abundance of Katherines (Green, 2006)

(Source: theewhutnot, via effyeahnerdfighters)

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Goosebumps.

That’s what I get every single freaking time I watch this video. It’s just… gahhh. I think it’s because it reminds me of why I love the fandom so much, how I’ve grown up with it, why — after all this time — I still damn enjoy every minute of reading the books and involving myself with anything to do with Harry Potter. 

I wish the future generation will have something like Harry Potter for them. Something powerful and captivating, something that will cause them enjoy and appreciate literature and the bliss of reading, because if there’s anything important that Harry Potter contributed to the world, it was the fact that it made us love reading again. That’s the real magic of Harry Potter, I think. And that magic is forever.

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