House of Fortitude

- William Soutar / Song

"

End is in beginning;
And in beginning end:
Death is not loss, nor life winning;
But each and to each is friend.

The hands which give are taking;
And the hands which take bestow:
Always the bough is breaking
Heavy wi...

- Fyodor Dostoevsky / The Brothers Karamazov

“The centripetal force on our planet is still fearfully strong, Alyosha. I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in ...

- Juan Rulfo / Pedro Páramo

"

What's taking you so long in the privy, son?"
"Nothing, mama."
"If you stay in there much longer, a snake will come and bite you"
"Yes, mama."
I was thinking of you, Susana of the green hills. Of when we
used to fly kites in...

- Umberto Eco / Foucault's Pendulum

"That was when I saw the Pendulum.

The sphere, hanging from a long wire set into the ceiling of the choir, swayed back and forth with isochronal majesty.

I knew -- but anyone could have sensed it in the magic of that serene breathing -...

- Annie Dillard / Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothi...

- David Foster Wallace / This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

“Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship....

- Vladimir Nabokov / Speak, Memory

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the...

- Jorge Luis Borges / The Aleph

“On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. T...

- E.M. Forster / Howards End

Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragmen...

- Madeline Miller / Circe

“I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband's pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children's skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the wo...

- Anthony Doerr / All the Light We Cannot See

“People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending...

Poll 5.

Another day, another poll.

One of the most important aspects that has shaped this photographic project over the years has been the many, many conversations it's given rise to. Many of these conversations centre around issues that typically...

- Oscar Wilde / De Profundis

“The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was ...

Poll 4.

I note that there is an issue currently with the Patreon app which results in the images not being shown straight away on the main page / feed, only to appear once a link has been clicked (or in collections which work as intended). Rest assured th...

- Georges Bataille / Erotism, Death & Sensuality

"Eroticism, an immediate aspect of inner experience as contrasted
with animal sexuality

Eroticism is one aspect of the inner life of man. We fail to realise this because man is everlastingly in search of an object outside himsel...

- John Updike / Self-Consciousness

“Is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity — the irrevocability of our deci...

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“It could be that God has not absconded but spread, as our vision and understanding of the universe have spread, to a fabric of spirit and sense so grand and subtle, so powerful in a new way, that we can only feel blindly of its hem. In making t...

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“The fact is,” said Van Gogh, “the fact is that we are painters in real life, and the important thing is to breathe as hard as ever we can breathe.”

So I breathe. I breathe at the open window above my desk, and a moist fragrance ass...

- Annie Dillard / Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“And under the cicadas, deeper down that the longest taproot, between and beneath the rounded black rocks and slanting slabs of sandstone in the earth, ground water is creeping. Ground water seeps and slides, across and down, across and down, le...

- Orhan Pamuk / My Name Is Red

“I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a colour?

Colour is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness. Because I’ve listened to souls whispering – like the susurrus of the wind – from book to ...

- André Breton / Poems of André Breton: A Bilingual Anthology

“L'union libre [Freedom of Love]"

My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade an...

- Ernest Becker / The Denial of Death

“We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality finitude. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that s...

- Ernest Becker / The Denial of Death

“What do we mean by the lived truth of creation? We have to mean the world as it appears to men in a condition of relative unrepression; that is, as it would appear to creatures who assessed their true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingnes...

- Malcolm Lowry / Under the Volcano

“They were climbing, approaching a little hilltop clearing; Yvonne could see the sky. But she couldn’t get her bearings. The Mexican sky had become strange and tonight the stars found for her a message even lonelier than that remembered one of...

- Ernest Becker / The Denial of Death

“The body, then, is one's animal fate that has to be struggled against in some ways. At the same time, it offers experiences and sensations, concrete pleasure that the inner symbolic world lacks. No wonder man is impaled on the horns of sexual p...

Autumn 2024 (BTS)

- Ernest Becker / Escape from Evil

“At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed-...

- Ernest Becker / The Denial of Death

“Man cannot endure his own littleness unless he can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level. People create the reality they need in order to discover themselves.

The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest nee...

- John Fowles / The Magus

“Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there ...

- Aldous Huxley / Brave New World

ART, SCIENCE–you seem to have paid a fairly high price for your happiness," said the Savage, when they were alone. "Anything else?"

"Well, religion, of course," replied the Controller. "There used to be something called God–before...