Virtuous Libertines

Painting by Roberto Ferri

Photography by Alexandra Bochkareva

"Death is a part of Life, they are dancing together the dance of infinity in front of the gates of Time. We can live our dreams as we are dreaming our future. Time is the Endless Consciousness." - Grigoris Deoudis

Paolo e Virginia by Alessandro Puttinati

Art by Loui Jover

“There were times when John Wade wanted to open up Kathy’s belly and crawl inside and stay there forever. He wanted to swim through her blood and climb up and down her spine and drink from her ovaries and press his guns against the firm red muscle of her heart.” —Tim O’Brien, In The Lake Of The Woods

Art by Rimel Neffati

Art by PedroTapa

“We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.” - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

"That was all he wanted now–to convince her, to show her how ecstatically and miserably he loved her. What for? Why try to convince her? Why show her anything? He didn’t know, but this was more essential than his life." - Ivan Bunin, from The Collected Short Stories; “Sunstroke,” wr. c. 1931

"Algebra is applied to the clouds; the radiation of the star profits the rose; no thinker would venture to affirm that the perfume of the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who knows the reciprocal ebb and flow of the infinitely great and the infinitely little, the reverberations of causes in the precipices of being, and the avalanches of creation?" - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Collage by Trash Riot Art

Art by Thomas Cooper Gotch

"The glance of women resembles certain combinations of wheels, which are tranquil in appearance yet formidable. You pass close to them every day, peaceably and with impunity, and without a suspicion of anything. A moment arrives when you forget that the thing is there. You go and come, dream, speak, laugh. All at once you feel yourself clutched; all is over. The wheels hold you fast, the glance has ensnared you. It has caught you, no matter where or how, by some portion of your thought which was fluttering loose, by some distraction which had attacked you. You are lost. The whole of you passes into it. A chain of mysterious forces takes possession of you. You struggle in vain; no more human succor is possible. You go on falling from gearing to gearing, from agony to agony, from torture to torture, you, your mind, your fortune, your future, your soul; and, according to whether you are in the power of a wicked creature, or of a noble heart, you will not escape from this terrifying machine otherwise than disfigured with shame, or transfigured by passion." - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution - then, it seems to me, all our problems would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.” - Aldous Huxley

Art by Caitlin Rose

Photography by Nona Limmen