photojojo:

These beautiful and haunting photos were salvaged from the Japan quake. 

The Salvage Memory Project has recovered 750,000 lost photos and returned 20,000 to their owners already!

Snapshots Recovered from the Japan Quake

via newyorker

(via tarts)

Regret

magnificentruin:

You spend your entire life saying, look Mom, look Dad, look what I did. 
Later, you wish you’d said instead: I saw what you did.

“Sometimes you suffocate when you think of the past; of a life that never was, flashing up in sepia. Memory which is creamy-yellow, cracked; composed of protogallic acid, protosulphate of iron, potassium cyanide. Let’s not get too technical. Not right now. It makes for too much exposure. Still, in the dark, you remember that in Shanghai they used to wrap tomatoes in tissue paper. Like this story. Like the way everything in history is wrapped in a tissue; of words, of memories, of lies.”
– Brian Castro, Shanghai Dancing (via millionsmillions)

(Source: themillions.com, via millionsmillions)

aseaofquotes: Amy Bloom, Away

aseaofquotes:

Amy Bloom, Away

The notes I made while reading Tiger’s Eye by Inga Clendinnen on my Kindle

I was meant to read this book middle of last year, because I thought it would be relevant to my Honours research and project (keywords: death, mothers, memories). It slipped through the cracks like so many other readings, and more than six months later I now know I was right. 

“In the absence of my mother’s lips – what is grief but the lack of particular lips?”

“Her frown came and went like summer lightning. Then the agitation was stilled forever as her brain was engulfed by one last massive influx of blood.”

“Now, when I am not many years younger than she was when she died, I am still sifting my handfuls of sand, still trying to make them stand and hold a shape I could call “my mother”.”

“The photographs in your head kill more slowly, layering the living flesh with other, earlier selves, other, earlier faces. My grandfather’s irony tilts a son’s mouth; a grand-niece looks at me with my sister’s eyes. The ghosts are multiplying. Some days I can’t see what is, for all the shadows in the way.”

“The picture suggested that the actuality of life, the actual history of our family, the sum of whatever they knew and had witnessed before we were born or when we were small, was right there; and yet I knew no matter how long I held the picture and stared at it, the paper and chemicals in that photograph would never be able to tell any of it to me. It might as well have never happened.”
– Three by Marc Basch in Electric Literature 6
“There is for all of us a twilight zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of a continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being … Children of small and vocal communities are likely to possess it to a high degree and, if they are imaginative, have the power of incorporating into their own lives a significant span of time before their individual births.”
– Conor Cruise O’Brien

(Source: Guardian)

antelucan: From here, other old ephemera series on my main (personal) blog.

antelucan:

From here, other old ephemera series on my main (personal) blog.

ecantwell: The Evolutionary Revolution, by Lily Hoang.  Postcard by Les Figues Press.

ecantwell:

The Evolutionary Revolution, by Lily Hoang. 

Postcard by Les Figues Press.

“It’s entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, far away. But there it lies—not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn’t create but calls.”
– Kafka - But Does It Float (via andrewharlow)

(via 1000reasonsnottostartmakingart)