Dark Edinburgh

"In my sleep I was looking out from the fourth-floor bedroom at nearby buildings bathed in rain, gleaming with neon and streetlamp colours."

• Yūko Tsushima, Territory of Light

"No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone."

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations

"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

"The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself."

• Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth

"For the eye sees not itself,
But by reflection, by some other things."
- William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

"Mists curled and smoked from dark and noisome pools. The reek of them hung stifling in the still air. Far away, now almost due south, the mountain-walls of Mordor loomed, like a black bar of rugged clouds floating above a dangerous fog-bound sea."

• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

"The street lamp sputtered The street lamp muttered in the dark."

• T.S. Eliot, Rhapsody on a Windy Night

"If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me is what people call its 'atmosphere'."
- George Orwell, The Moon Under Water

"I was walking alone in the peaceful city. I was alone, but I was marching like a descending regiment."

• Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered."

• Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

"Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places."
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

"I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs."
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions

"Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour."
- Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay

"To love is not to look at one another, it is to look together in the same direction."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

"The very houses seemed disposed to sleep, and it was a holiday for the streets, which were swept of their customary passengers, and left to their own quiet and shadows."

• Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge

"The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion which we must take seriously."
- Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy

"The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. K. stood a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him."
- Franz Kafka, The Castle

"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
- Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

"It's not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can't get rid of them."
- Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

"Every man's memory is his private literature."
- Aldous Huxley

"Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too."
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

"He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down."
- Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety

"Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more."
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"The greatest products of architecture are less the works of individuals than of society... the deposit left by a whole people; the heaps accumulated by centuries; the residue of successive evaporations of human society, in a word, a species of formation."
- Hunchback of Notre-Dame

"I felt that I was a justified person... but I was a solitary one. I had no person to whom I could reveal the strange experiences of my spirit, or the mysterious shadows that followed me through the damp, airless lanes of the town."
- James Hogg

"A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger."
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it."
- Søren Kierkegaard

"My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

"The electric tension was so great that at certain moments any chance comer, though unknown, gave off light. Then the twilight obscurity would fall again."
- Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

"A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood."
- Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

"Water is fluid, soft, and yielding. But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield. As a rule, whatever is fluid, soft, and yielding will overcome whatever is rigid and hard."

• Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

"To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastward is almost a palpable movement. The sensation may be caused by the panoramic glide of the stars past earthly objects."
- Thomas Hardy. Far From The Madding Crowd

#Introduction
Dark Edinburgh is a long running (since 2010) photo project by @sml@mastodon.scot

One photo is posted a day with a (usually) appropriate quote from literature.

There is a book (see photo), you can buy prints, all money raised goes to support Simon Community Scotland to help the homeless. Links in profile.

#photography #edinburgh #scotland

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."
- Milan Kundera