The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: sonder 

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

This is similar to what Charles Dickens was saying in A Tale of Two Cities. I love this concept, which is, at it’s very heart, an acknowledgement of complexity in every person.

@1 day ago with 12119 notes
#charles dickens #the dictionary of obscure sorrows #IMAGINE PEOPLE COMPLEXLY 
This is a thing that happened in 1914. I’m not sure I don’t prefer the story without dialogue.

This is a thing that happened in 1914. I’m not sure I don’t prefer the story without dialogue.

@3 days ago
#rex beach #The Spoilers #1914 #1906 
sunstreaker:

Eilean Donan Castle (by Grant Glendinning)

sunstreaker:

Eilean Donan Castle (by Grant Glendinning)

@4 days ago with 14 notes

"Why, I’ve et bacon till my immortal soul has growed a rind."

Bill Dextry, The Spoilers by Rex Beach
@4 days ago
#The Spoilers #Best-Seller #Rex Beach #Dextry #Bacon 

"Piracy is our only option."

Edward Ferrars, Sense and Sensibility (The movie from the 1990s.)
@5 days ago with 5 notes
#Jane Austen #Sense and Sensibility #the future #hope 

So, my dog is afraid of the dark. He legitimately will not go outside unless the porch light is on. 

And even then, he’s nervous.

I think my dog has anxiety problems.

@3 days ago
#anxiety #dog #dogs #puppy #understatement #the things I ponder late at night while enduring dog-induced insomnia 

People as Books

Here it is, emphasis mine, but otherwise untouched:

“A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?”


@4 days ago with 1 note
#charles dickens #books #metaphor #a tale of two cities 

"The frontier is capable of no finer compliment than this utter disregard of one’s folded pages. It betokens that highest faith in one’s fellow-man, the belief that he should be measured by his present deeds, not by his past. It says, translated: “This is God’s free country where a man is a man, nothing more. Our land is new and pure, our faces are to the front. If you have been square, so much the better; if not, leave behind the taints of artificial things and start again on the level—that’s all."

The Spoilers, Rex Beach

I’m really fond of the metaphor of people as books. It happens in A Tale of Two Cities as well… just a moment.

@4 days ago with 1 note
#Best-Seller #Rex Beach #Surprising Beauty #The Spoilers #books #metaphor 

Robert Downey Jr. and a cat.

(Source: iwantcupcakes)

@5 days ago with 88159 notes

"It is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than yours."

Virginibus Puerisque, Robert Louis Stevenson

I like the fact that literature is there to remind us that practically nobody has ever been perfect.

@5 days ago
#Virginibus puerisque #Robert Louis Stevenson #marriage