(via se17enteen)
types of girls
spring girls. they make you feel the way your favourite color palette feels. Their eyes remind you of honey. fuzzy lambs and soft animals make them more excited than anything. kisses as soft as dandelions and cheeks that turn pink at the slightest acts of affection. their hair carries flowers and vanilla in the wind. peach daydreams and pretty words that they are too shy to send. telling them your thoughts feels like confiding in the moon. they make you feel the sweetest kind of comfort.
autumn girls. a soft heart that is continuously being healed and broken. a poet that associates every little thing with a person or a memory. bullet journals filled with dreams and pressed flowers and plane tickets. road trips together under the starlit sky, but also lazy afternoons on the sofa. photographs can’t capture their entire beauty. they make you want to do everything and be everything. a quiet beauty that grows more radiant the more you know them. they make you excited to be alive.
summer girls. everything they do is so luminous and breathtaking, you can’t look away. they make you feel sun-kissed. windows open in the warm evening. feeling nostalgia as you are living in the moment. old french songs on the radio. conversations with them makes you fall in love with the world. scrunchies round their wrist, smiles during kisses, and a signature perfume. magic tumbles from their lips. nothing makes them happier than seeing others happy too. they make you crave sunlight, and ignites a desire to become a better person.
winter girls. the longest hugs where they refuse to let go. soft music in the background, sleeping on your shoulder in the car. eyes full of stories, long conversations about the meaning of life in the darkness. sentimental objects and words from the right person can comfort them. they can act emotionless, but they melt in your arms. temptation to stay in bed during the daylight and stay awake until dawn. they make you appreciate midnights and find love in silent moments.
Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.
This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose…
…Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. - And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.
(via wordsnquotes)
(via wordsnquotes)
‘’I got into this business because I love stories. They comfort us, they inspire us, they create a context for how we experience the world. But also, you have to be careful, because if you spend a lot of times with stories, you start to believe that life is just stories, and it’s not. Life is just life, and that’s so sad, because there’s so little time and…what are we doing with it?’’
Princess Carolyn
Bojack Horseman Season 4
Episode 12: ‘’What Time Is It Right Now’’
(via blowjobhorseman)
Japanese babies are upending the world of linguistics, one mora at a time
A really interesting article about how babies learn Japanese. Excerpt:
Nissan, Toyota, Honda — three universally recognized car manufacturers, two of which are also common Japanese surnames. If you ask an English speaker to tell you which name is longest, they’ll say Toyota, with its three syllables. A Japanese speaker, on the other hand, will say Nissan. This difference reveals a lot about the underlying rhythms used in human vocal communication, says developmental neurolinguist Reiko Mazuka of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, and also casts doubt on universal theories of language-learning that are mostly based on studies of English speakers.
So why is Nissan longer to Japanese ears? It’s all based on ‘mora’, a counter of linguistic rhythm that is distinct from stress (like in German or English) or syllable (like in French). Most people are familiar with this pattern of counting from haiku, the five–seven–five pattern that defines the classical Japanese meter. The ‘syllables’ in haiku aren’t really syllables but rather morae. Nissan thus has four morae of equal duration (ニッサン or ni-s-sa-n), rather than just the two syllables picked up by Western ears.
But Japanese babies are not born with an internal mora counter, and this is what got Mazuka so interested in returning to Japan from the United States, where she completed her PhD and still maintains a research professorship at Duke University. “The Japanese language doesn’t quite fit with the dominant theories,” she says, “and I used to think this was because Japanese was exceptional. Now my feeling is, Japanese is not an exception. Rather, what works for English is not universal” in terms of mechanisms for language learning.
Mazuka’s lab on the outskirts of Tokyo studies upwards of 1,000 babies a year, and she explains that infants start to recognize mora as a phonemic unit at about 10 months of age. “Infants have to learn how duration and pitch are used as cues in language,” she says. And Japanese is one of the few languages in the world that contains duration-based phonemic contrasts — what English speakers think of as short and long vowels, for example — that can distinguish one mora from two morae. Dominant ideas in the field suggest all babies, from birth, use rhythm as a ‘bootstrap’ to start segmenting sounds into speech, first identifying whether they are dealing with a syllable- or stress-based language. “The theory says that rhythm comes first, but Japanese babies can’t count morae until they’re almost a year old,” Mazuka exclaims. “You can’t conclude that rhythm is the driving force of early phonological development, when evidence from Japanese babies shows it’s not an a prioriunit.”
What about a bookstore with a resident cat where u can pet the cat
No graph goes that high
(via sluggg)
