I Want To Go Back To The Beginning. We All Do. I Think: Hurt Won’t Be There. But I’m Wrong.

The Accursed Kings in 1314

being human is terrifying

“I took comfort in the illusion that I could go back [to my hometown]. But I’d been around long enough to know history is sealed and unchangeable. You can move on, with a heart stronger in the places it’s been broken, create new love. You can hammer pain and trauma into a righteous sword and use it in defense of life, love, human grace and God’s blessing. But nobody gets a do-over. Nobody gets to go back and there’s only one road out. Ahead, into the dark.”

— Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run (via readingcities)

- Evelyn Waugh, from Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Lamar Valley, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Taken August 2021

Daniel Chester French, The Sons of God Saw the Daughters of Men

me reblogging this as a stone

“It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one’s nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.”

— The Alexiad, written by Anna Komnene, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, c. 1148.

me forcing myself to do things that make me feel better

Jen Mazza (American, b. 1972, Washington DC, USA) - Peripety (5), 2008 from Peripety Project, Paintings: Oil on Linen

vintage dollhouse miniature furniture in box