I was checking out reviews of the graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and became extremely irate at this sentence (which followed a one of five star critique): “I’d love to see this book rewritten, with really developed characters, complex sentences, and rich vocabulary.” First, I want to be clear that I have not yet read the book (it is in my queue), and so I can not vouch for the merit of the story itself. However, what really irritated me was the fact that the reason behind giving such a terrible review of the book was to basically wish it were something other than it is. I am fairly certain that the author/artist decided to base his story around images for a reason. I can’t help but feel that it is another example of people blatantly misunderstanding the comic/graphic novel medium and choosing to place it in a position that is lower than literary fiction. I take offense to this, sir or madam! In fact, my immediate response is to call you a dolt, but as I view Internet trolling to be completely void of any decency, I will just think it to myself (read is: rant about it in my blog). ;)

(Source: maloriebrooke)

Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
Until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.

(Source: catherinelauren)

• For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
  -Ernest Hemingway
• Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time
  -Alan Moore
• Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses.
  -Richard Powers
• The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
  -Orson Scott Card
• Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
  -Margaret Atwood

unknown source.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before… He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

Ward Shelley “History of Science Fiction”. 

(Source: maloriebrooke)

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

Book buying. I love that this week there are four nonfiction books in the mix. 

(Source: maloriebrooke)

This made me smile so much. I <3 Kate Beaton.  I related to Anne so much when I was little.

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art -
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors -
No - yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon to death.

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me.

Illustration by Jessie M. King from The Fisherman and His Soul by Oscar Wilde. Lovely.