Fernando Pessoa” “The First Property of Things is Motion” (Part Three)

Tattoo Art in Motion: Part Three

“Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.”
Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

Fernando Pessoa: “The First Property of Things is Motion” (Part Two)

Tattoo Art in Motion: Part Two

“Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.”
Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

 

Jeanette Winterson: “Writing on the Body”

Photographers Unknown, (Writings on the Body)

“Who taught you to write in blood on my back? Who taught you to use your hands as branding irons? You have scored your name into my shoulders, referenced me with your mark. The pads of your fingers have become printing blocks, you tap a message on to my skin, tap meaning into my body.” 

–Jeanette Winterson, Writing on the Body

 

Daniel Mendelsohn: “There is Only Looking and Finding”

Photographers Unknown, There is Only Looking and Finding

“I did and do believe, after all that I’ve seen and done, that if you project yourself into the mass of things, if you look for things, if you search, you will, by the very act of searching, make something that would not otherwise have happened, you will find something, even something small, something that will certainly be more than if you hadn’t gone looking in the first place, if you hadn’t asked our grandfather anything at all…There are no miracles, no magical coincidences. There is only looking and finally seeing, what was always there.”
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Karl Ove Knausgaard: “Even Though the Suitcase Was Heavy”

Two Trunks and a Suitcase

“Even though the suitcase was heavy I carried it by the handle as I walked into the departure hall. I detested the tiny wheels, first of all because they were feminine, thus not worthy of a man, a man should carry, not roll, secondly because they suggested easy options, shortcuts, savings, rationality, which I despised and opposed wherever I could, even where it was of the most trivial significance. Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight? Were we just images? And what were we actually saving energy for with these energy-saving devices?”

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Neil Gaiman: “. . .If You Are Willing to be Jaunty”

Photographer Unknown, Title Unknown, (Black Hats and Sacred Hearts)

“Some hats can only be worn if you’re willing to be jaunty, to set them at an angle and to walk beneath them with a spring in your stride as if you’re only a step away from dancing. They demand a lot of you.”

Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

The Griffin

Photographer Unknown, (The Griffin)

“As when a Gryfon through the Wilderness

With winged course ore Hill or moarie Dale,
Pursues the ARIMASPIAN, who by stelth
Had from his wakeful custody purloind
The guarded Gold. . . .”                                                                                                  -John Milton, Paradise Lost