See also film blog for poncy celebration of nuns without clothes.
Quote reblogged from Poe's Mistress with 300 notes
I had spent my solitary hours disguising my soul. Its masks were so perfect that when their paths crossed in the grand square of my consciousness they didn’t recognize each other. But the facepaints that I’d used seemed indelible. To clean them off, I rubbed so hard that I took off the skin. And my soul, like a face galled to the quick, no longer resembled human form.
—
Claude Cahun, Aveux non avenus (Disavowals), translation by Susan de Muth
(via frenchtwist)
Quote with 18 notes
Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.
— Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900
Page 54 of 760