hell

with @sushkass 

“Given my lack of experience, if my books were taken away from me, I would be utterly devastated. That’s how much I depend on what’s written in books. I’ll read one book and be completely wild about it - I’ll trust it, I’ll assimilate it, I’ll sympathize with it, I’ll try to make it a part of my life. Then, I’ll read another book and instantly, I’ll switch over to that one.”

—  Dazai Osamu, Schoolgirl

“He read the novel over and over again in the dim glow of the lamp. And even when the book wasn’t open before him, he was imagining scenes from it…Imagining? His imaginings were even realer than reality to him… but he had gone on endlessly laughing and crying over books. Each was a kind of transformation for him… . [He] thus quite naturally learned everything he knew from books - or at least there was nothing he knew that didn’t owe something to books.”

— Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, “Daidoji Shinsuke: The Early Years”

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

(𝟖.𝟎𝟓.𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟏)

ℍ𝕒𝕡𝕡𝕪 𝔹𝕚𝕣𝕥𝕙𝕕𝕒𝕪 𝕊𝕙𝕚𝕓𝕦𝕤𝕒𝕨𝕒!

Batman: Black & White #5 - “The Man Who Flies” (2021)