Venu Shekar

new wave movies; art. photography; books

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

I had a very interesting find in the secondhand bookstore. An old edition (Sars Edition) of Mary Webb’s ´The Golden Arrow.’ It was perhaps a Christmas gift to a loved one in 1949, looking at the writing on front page. What a wonderful literary treasure.

[Natural Philosophy @Naturalphilosy]

“Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.”

— Albert Camus

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

.. Happy earthworms frolicked purple in the slush. Green nettles nodded. Trees bent.

-The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

"It hadn't changed, the June Rain.

Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds. The grass looked wetgreen and pleased.

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

.. it was no longer a shallow flower cup but a darkening gleaming mirror that might give back strange depths of feeling."

-The Reef, Edith Wharton

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

" ' .. One look in one's glass, after all!'

She launched the closing words at him on a cry that lifted them above the petulance of vanity; but his sense of his words was lost in the surprise of her face. Under the flying clouds of her excitement..

[Annie @annie151092]

Leseunterricht (The Reading Lesson), an 1889 oil on wood
The artist : Franz von Defregger (1835–1921) #paintings #art

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

..But one who passed by said to him:

'There are two worse plights than yours. One is to have no god; the other is to build a mud hut and mistake it for the Parthenon.'"

-The Valley of Childish Things, Edith Wharton

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

"There was once a man who had seen the Parthenon, and he wished to build his god a temple like it.

But he was not a skillful man, and, try as he would, he could produce only a mud hut thatched with straw; and he sat down and wept because he could not build a temple for his god..

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

..Saturday will always intervene, and Friday and Saturday will come between me and Thursday. A constant process of adjustment is going on about the past - every ingredient dropped into it from the present must affect the whole.'

-Dimensions for a Novel, Elizabeth Bishop

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

'This is Sunday. If I try to think of Friday I cannot recreate Friday pure and simple, exactly as it was. It has been changed for me by intervening Saturday. A certain piece of work that on Friday I planned to have finished on Saturday I did not finish. , so that now ..

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

..looking back from Sunday I discover a certain ironic tinge about Friday evening. Someone came to see me Friday afternoon whom I was delighted to see; but since that time many things have come back to mind and it is impossible to look at the visitor with the eyes of Friday.

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

"I drink a rusty, icy drink out of the biggest dipper, still, nothing much happens.

We are waiting for a scream. But it is not screamed again, and the red sun sets in silence."

-In the Village, Elizabeth Bishop

[LiteraryVienna @LiteraryVienna]

„Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.“

Iris Murdoch
* July 15, 1919

[Isabel @IsabelVasques7]

🎨Harald Slott-Møller (Danish, 1864 - 1937)
"Længsel, Longing", 1913

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

"Tomorrow is another day toward death, (which can never happen to me because I am I which spells invulnerable.) Over orange juice & coffee even the embryonic suicide brightens visibly.-

-The Journals of Sylvia Plath

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

-in the past, in the present, and those years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live, forever - not loud, just alive forever..."

-In the Village, Elizabeth Bishop

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

"A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pale blue skies, skies that travelers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little..

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

..more around the horizon - or is it around the rims of the eyes? - the color of the cloud of the bloom of the elm trees, the violet on the fields of oats; something darkening over the woods and waters as well as the sky. The scream hangs like that, unheard, in memory -

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions."

-Souls Belated, Edith Wharton

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

" 'It maybe necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions - but if we believed in them, why did we break through them! And if we don't believe in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?'

[Venu Shekar @shekar_venu]

Gannett hesitated. 'One may believe in them or not, but as long as they rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection that one can find a modus vivendi.'

'Do outlaws need a modus vivendi?'