image via nowness
She's daughter of French musical legend Serge and 60s It Girl actress Jane Birkin. I won't be posting pictures today of her effortless style which French women seem to be born with, but I want to share this which I thought was so so apt:
"I want to be less embarrassed by who I am but not aspire to be someone different."Labels: Inspiration, Quotes
I finally found and bought A History of Love by Nicole Krauss on Friday. Started on it yesterday and couldn't put it down. It's about loss but it doesn't make me feel entirely sad, there is humour in it and makes me smile. Have you ever read something that was heart-wrenching and heart-warming at the same time? It's the first time I feel the need to highlight in a book, to mark out the wonderful bits of it. But I didn't of course. It haunts me even after I put it down. It makes me want to send a long heartfelt letter to those that are important to me and tell them "You mean a lot to me, don't ever leave."
This particular part was entitled
The Death of Isaac Babel:
Only after they charged him with the crime of silence did Babel discover how many kinds of silences existed. When he heard music he no longer listened to the notes, but the silences in between. When he read a book he gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered; the folds of curtain drapes, the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him, he heard less and less of what they were not. He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences, which is like solving a tough case without any clues, not only intuition. And no one could accuse him of not being prolific in his chosen métier. Daily, he turned out whole epics of silence. In the beginning it had been difficult. Imagine the burden of keeping silent when your child asks you whether God exists, or the woman you love asks if you love her back. At first Babel longed for the use of just two words: Yes and No. But he knew that just to utter a single word would be to destroy the delicate fluency of silence.
Even after they arrested him and burned all of his manuscripts, which were all blank pages, he refused to speak. Not even a groan when they gave him a blow to the head, a boot tip in the groin. Only at the last possible moment, as he faced the firing squad, did the writer Babel suddenly sense the possibility of his error. As the rifles were pointed at his chest he wondered if what he had taken for the richness of silence was really the poverty of never being heard. He had thought the possibilities of human silence were endless. But as the bullets tore from the rifles, his body was riddled with the truth. And a small part of him laughed bitterly because, anyway, how could he have forgotten what he had always known: There’s no match for the silence of God.
How do you feel? How can anyone not hear silence after reading that and not feel sad for the things that should have been said but were not, because words failed to convey the emotions behind them and silence replaced it instead? There are so many other beautiful passages in the book and I really recommend you to pick it up (plus if you did, the title of this post would have made you smile :>).
Labels: Literature, Musings, Quotes
For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.
- Benjamin Button, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Labels: Quotes
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a tellar but for want of an understanding ear.”
- Stephen King (Different Seasons)
Labels: Quotes
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