9/26/08 03:08 pm"At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?" -Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy This phantasm of falling petals vanishes into moon and flowers -Basho Such nights are possible, and we survive them. It is a matter of sleeping next to the adored body you no longer have the right or inclination to love. Whether you are the one who casts off, or the castoff yourself; whether your arms are the recoilers, or the ones that reach wantingly, then pull back, remembering they are no longer wanted. -Pages For You by Sylvia Brownrigg "I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still had any meaning for me." -The Stranger, Albert Camus I went off with fists in my torn pockets; My coat was completely threadbare. I followed you, Muse, where you led me, Dreamed of loves -- ah -- so fine and so rare. -Rimbaud,Ma Boheme "She complained that we had taught her to believe in her dreams...but that when she tried to tell us what her dreams were, we all laughed at her." -The Search for Belle Prater by Ruth White "You still cry too easily, but without your tears, at least, everything would burn. You are Spring in your jeans, in the laughing leaves. I think pearls melted over your bones." -Wasteland by Francesca Lia Block Why should I blame her that she filled my days With misery, or that she would of late Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, Or hurled the little streets upon the great, Had they but courage equal to desire? What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn? -"No Second Troy," by W.B. Yeats I hurl my heart to halt his pace, To quench his thirst i squander bood; He eats, and still his need seeks food, Compels a total sacrifice. His voice waylays me, spells a trance, The gutted forest falls to ash Appaled by secret want, i rush From such assault of radience. Entering the tower of my fears, I shut the doors on that dark guilt, I bolt the door, each door i bolt. Blood quickens, gonging in my ears: The panther's tread is on the stairs, Coming up and up the stairs. -Pursuit, by Sylvia Plath ‘You can’t go back,’ she told him bluntly. Her voice was neither kind nor unkind. ‘That part of your life is over. Set it aside as something you have finished. Complete or no, it is done with you. No being gets to decide what his life is “supposed to be”.’ She lifted her eyes and her gaze stabbed at him. ‘Be a man. Discover where you are now, and go on from there, making the best of things. Accept your life, and you might survive it. If you hold back from it, insisting this is not your life, not where you are meant to be, life will pass you by. You may not die from such foolishness, but you might as well be dead for all the good your life will do you or anyone else.’ -Robin Hobb, The Mad Ship: Book Two, The Liveship Trader “…when you let go and follow your fate instead of trying to twist your life around and master it, a man finds that happiness follows him.” Fool’s Fate, Robin Hobb, The Tawny Man Trilogy, Book Three "But I think there comes a point in love, a unique moment which later on the soul seeks in vain to surpass, and that the effort to revive such happiness depletes it; that nothing thwarts happiness so much as the memory of happiness." -"The Immoralist" by Andre Gide Who, if I screamed out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels? And if one suddenly did take me to his heart: I would perish from his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the onset of terror we're still just able to bear, and we admire it because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying. -The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke Ultimately, we do what we love to do. I like to think that I do things for the right reasons, but I don’t, I do things because I do or don’t love them. Because of sin, because I am self-addicted, living in the wreckage of the fall, my body, my heart, and my affections are prone to love things that kill me. -from Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller Yes, there is no Fate for us Only those who are swallowed by Ignorance and fear and miss a step Fall into the rapid river called Fate We are all dead since we are born The end is there before anything starts If to live is to continue learning The end is when we learn the very last thing To finally discover the end and learning about it completely is what death is We are not allowed to learn about something Those who cannot transcend death, shouldn't learn of anything -BLEACH manga translations Adolescents do get very angry with their parents, and acknowledging this anger is part of acknowledging them. If the anger is not acknowledged then its expression is increased. The parent seems super-strong. The adolescent tries to become the super-attacker. -Terri Apter "But truth seemed to be changing. I had thought that truth was always simple and clear. A thing was true or it was a lie. But now, as time seemed simultaneously to stand still and rush by me with the startling speed of a meteor, I knew truth was as complicated as time. " -Camilla by Madeleine L'Engle "The mind has a thousand eyes And the heart but one: Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done." -The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Francis William Bourdillon "Tuck your chin in; you're going to get hurt, so expect it and be ready; you may as well see it coming." -Rhapsody by Elizabeth Haydon It hurts when we love somebody, because loving is a painful thing, that is it’s nature. Today, even though we are not sure that the pain will pass, it has to be said that our loving is hurting us. -Now That You’re Back, A.L. Kennedy What is kinder--to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance--or to see them as they are,and accept it because it makes them comfortable? -Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven. But not those who lack the courage of their own greatness. -Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead "Sometimes a person gets tired of being fixed all the time. Where every little problem becomes a project. Where every little shortcoming needs to be addressed. They eventually have to share with someone." -Mary E. Pearson The Adoration of Jenna Fox You want to break something else in me! Is that why you’re here? -A Separate Peace by John Knowles I know what it's like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in but you can't. How you hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside. -Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen It would hurt. Even for my kind, pain still hurts. If you move and act in the material world, then the material world acts on you. Pain hurts, just as greed intoxicates and lust burns. We may not die easy and we sure as hell don't die well, but we can die. If we're still loved and remembered, something else a whole lot like us comes along and takes our place and the whole damn thing starts all over again. And if we're forgotten, we're done. -American Gods, Neil Gaiman Dare I say I miss him? I do. I miss him. I still see him in my dreams. They are nightmares mostly, but nightmares tinged with love. -Yann Martel- Life of Pi I still cannot understand how he could abandon me so unceremoniously, without any sort of goodbye, without looking back even once. That pain is like an axe that chops at my heart. -Yann Martel- Life of Pi Can we only love Something created in our own imaginations? Are we all in fact unloving and unlovable? Then one is alone, and if one is alone Then lover and beloved are equally unreal And the dreamer is no more real than his dreams. -T.S. Eliot~ The Cocktail Party I think I've heard enough. I don't think so. There's so much more, it goes on and on, see? She gripped his wrist hard and he winced. And what do you know about me? You want a test, here's a test: tell me what the hell you know about me. I don't know. She threw his hand down. You don't know. You don't know! She shouted, her voice breaking. And the most awful part of it is that I still love you. I've lost you and yet you're still here. To taunt me. Can you understand? Do you have any empathy at all for what it's like? - Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss "So, I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there. We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them." -The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky I'm not sentimental - I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last - the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise 'For though she flee, soon she'll be chasing; though she refuse gifts, she'll be giving; though she love not, she'll love despite herself' -Sappho I know where Sadness lives Among roses and the clouds In memory-haunted houses With long sun-stained walls I know the paths it walks at sunset and dawn The twilights between worlds The cliffs from where it watches The tide go out and return I know where it lies down to sleep And where its coat is kept On an empty peg in the wardrobe Of Always Never Yet -Stefan Nesbit, I Know Where Sadness Lives "Don't ask for guarantees. And don't look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore." -Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury What's madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall, That place among the rocks--is it a cave, Or winding path? The edge is what I have. -Theodore Roethke, In A Dark Time "Jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down." - Ray Bradbury “Last night, I thought that if I cut deep enough, I might be able to see all the way down past blood and bone and marrow to the place where it aches all the time.” -Second Glance, Jodi Picoult "How depressing would it be to know you're part of the reason things aren't perfect? To look in on the best of all possible worlds and notice you're not there." -Ryan North, Dinosaur Comics "I saw her, in the fire, but now. I hear her in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night," returned the haunted man. -Charles Dickens, The Haunted Man "Perhaps it is true that we do not really exist until there is someone there to see us existing, we cannot properly speak until there is someone there who can understand what we are saying, in essence, we are not wholly alive until we are loved." -Alain De Button, Essays In Love I know nothing more shattering than to love with all your heart, than not to be able however hard you try to break yourself of it, someone who you know is worthless. -"A Casual Affair", W. Somerset Maugham A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing--not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past. -The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje "I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music." -George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid. It is no conservationist love. It is a big game hunter and you are the game. A curse on this game. -Written On The Body, by Jeanette Winterson "I opened myself to you only to be skinned alive. The more vulnerable I became, the faster and more deft your knife. Knowing what was happening, still I stayed and let you carve more. That's how much I loved you. That's how much. -Rabih Alameddine: I, the Divine "i wanna explain how exhausted i am, even in my dreams, how i wake up tired, how i'm being drowned by some kind of black wave. But i can't write and he doesn't wanna know about it anyway." -Elizabeth Wurtzel [from book: Prozac Nation] "a child's emotion recollected in melancholy" - Sandy Jeffs [Book: Blood Relations] "The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction." -Allen Ginsberg [from poem: Song] "In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. " -William Burroughs "but am I complaining when for months you rubbed salt in my eyes with a sordid taste in your mouth and a look of contempt to tell me one day we could be a skeletal form pieced together by more than shallow phone calls and bad grammar as you explain priorities like they had never crossed my mind" -the atlantic from poem: steep "But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave" -the unbearable lightness of being "Tomas kept trying to convince her that love and lovemaking were two different things. She refused to understand. Now she was surrounded by men she did not care for in the slightest. What would making love with them be like? She yearned to try it, if only in the form of the no-guarantee promise called flirting. Let there be no mistake: Tereza did not wish to take revenge on Tomas; she merely wished to find a way out of the maze. She knew that she had become a burden to him; she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love." -the unbearable lightness of being It's not Kartik's longing that hurts. It's my own. It's knowing that I'll never have what she has--a beauty so powerful it brings things to you. I fear I will always have to chase the things I want. I'll always have to wonder whether I'm truly wanted or whether I've just been settled for. -Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty "Cedy, I may be wrong, but the way I see it, there's three parts to love. Three ways of doing it - mind, body and soul. When you get all the three happening at once, that's it. That's the real thing." -Martine Murray, The Slightly True Story of Cedar B. Hartley Hatred is love that's been injured. If you have hatred in your heart it means you have love in it also. -The Women of Lockerbie by Deborah Brevoort Before, I thought we could write about life only when we had recovered from our wounds; when we were able to touch old sores with a pen and not revive the pain; when we could look back free from nostalgia, madness, and a sense of grievance. But is this really possible? We are never completely cut off from our memory. Recollections provides the inspiration for writing, the stimulus for painting, and for some, the motivation even for death. -"Memory in the Flesh" by Ahlam Mosteghanemi And each night in bed I thought of her as the moon came through my window. I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did. In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn't the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert. -Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli I used to be a hopeless romantic. I am still a hopeless romantic. I used to believe that love was the highest value. I still believe that love is the highest value. I don't expect to be happy. I don't imagine that I will find love, whatever that means, or that if I do find it, it will make me happy. I don't think of love as the answer or the solution. I think of love as a force of nature - as strong as the sun, as necessary, as impersonal, as gigantic, as impossible, as scorching as it is warming, as drought-making as it is live-giving. And when it burns out, the planet dies. My little orbit of life circles love. I daren't get any closer. I'm not a mystic seeking final communion. I don't go out without SPF 15. I protect myself. But today, when the sun is everywhere, and everything solid is nothing but its own shadow, I know that the real things in life, the things I remember, the things I turn over in my hands, are not houses, bank accounts, prizes or promotions. What I remember is love - all love - love of this dirt road, this sunrise, a day by the river, the stranger I met in a cafe. Myself, even, which is the hardest thing of all to love, because love and selfishness are not the same thing. It is easy to be selfish. It is hard to love who I am. No wonder I am surprised if you do. -Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson You are the door in the rock that finally swings free when moonlight shines on it. You are the door at the top of the stairs that only appears in dreams. You are the door that sets the prisoner free. You are the carved low door into the Chapel of the Grail. You are the door at the edge of the world. You are the door that opens onto a sea of stairs. Open me. Wide. Narrow. Pass through me, and whatever lies on the other side, could not be reached except by this. This you. This now. This caught moment opening into a lifetime. -Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson He doubted her. You must never doubt the one you love. But they might not be telling the truth. Never mind that. You tell them the truth. What do you mean? You can't be another person's honesty, child, but you can be your own. So what should I say? When? When I love someone? You should say it. -Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson We lived for the night. The torch in your window was my signal. When it was lit, I stayed away. When you extinguished it, I came to you - secret doors, dark corridors, forbidden stairs, brushing aside fear and propriety like cobwebs. I was inside you. You contained me. Together, in bed, we could sleep, we could dream, and if we heard your servant's mournful cry, we called it a bird or a dog. The light was a lie. Only here, the sun killed, and time's hands bound, were we free. Imprisoned in each other, we were free. -Lighthousekeeping by Jeanette Winterson "I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it'll make sense." -Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury It’s not that I literally think I’m a faerie. It’s just that I feel so different from most people. And this idea of a race living underground in caverns, spending all their days dancing and playing the fiddle and eating flowers and reciting poetry and sharing their dreams, that to me sounds much more real than the way people live in this world, hating and fighting and wanting and hurting. -Violet & Claire, FLB I wish I wasn’t a girl who needed so much but a little free creature that slept in deserts and ran on clouds and lived on lilies. -Violet & Claire, FLB She, too, would like to hang by her own webbed black wings that could take her away when she needed them, take her as far as the full moon that had begun to rise. -Violet & Claire, FLB And what would it do to me? Playing in the dark. Would I become Vile again, secretly collecting razor blades in an asylum and hiding them under my tongue to carve screenplays on my body? -Violet & Claire, FLB I love you because no two snowflakes are alike and it is possible if you stand tippy-toe to walk between the raindrops I love you because I am afraid of the dark and can't sleep in the light because I rub my eyes when I wake up in the morning and find you there because you with all your magic powers were determined that I should love you because there was nothing for you but that I would love you -"Resignation," Nikki Giovanni "Yet to sing love, love must first shatter us." -Hilda Doolittle "Of love...daroga...I am dying... of love...That is how it is..loved her so!...And I love her still...daroga...and I am dying of love for her, I ...I tell you!...If you knew how beautiful she was...when she let me kiss her...alive...It was the first...time, daroga, the first...time I ever kissed a woman...Yes, alive...I kissed her alive...and she looked as beautiful as if she had been dead!" -The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux "There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft... When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness." -The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini "Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity." -Rainer Maria Rilke You helped them to do it. You deceived me, betrayed me, and you'll do worse if you get the chance... ...if i was bound for hell let it be hell. no more false heavens. No more damned magic. You hate me and i hate you. Now. My hate is colder, stronger, and you'll have no hate to warm yourself. You will have nothing. ...nothing left but hopelessness. Say die and i will die. Say die and watch me die. -Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea What she wanted was love, and the best way to go looking for it was through sex. But it never worked that way, and the sex just made her lonelier. I understood that, as it had made me lonelier too. I couldn’t ever remember being lonely before, certainly not in this way, until I had seen the edge of all the ways you could be with another person, which brought up all the myriad ways that person could never be there for you. -Truth and Beauty: A Friendship, Anne Patchett [ ...We were always escaping, you see - escaping, or standing ready to escape; running away from her demons; trying to avoid the outcome of what had been started - making off with the matches just when the fires had caught hold. -The Piano Man's Daughter, Timothy Findley I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our more stupid melancholy propensities, for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one’s very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away? -Voltaire, Candide "What's going to happen? I'm going to love you as long as you'll let me, and I'll teach you a little about literature and about real music, and then you'll break my heart." -Love invents us, by Amy Bloom What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else? I never knew it was possible to think about someone all of the time, for someone to be always doing acrobatic leaps across your thoughts. Everything else was an unwelcome distraction from what I wanted to think about. I still cannot believe you have gone. Before this, I used to wake up and wonder for a split second why I had this weight of grief pressing down on my chest and why my pillow was wet. I used to forget because it was just absurd for me to be without you. Absurd. But you did die. And for no reason at all. ‘Life goes on’: so many people had said that to me. Yes, life fucking well goes on but what if you don’t want it to? What if you want to arrest it, stop it, or even battle against the current into a past you don’t want to be past? ‘You’ll get over it’ – that as another. But I didn’t want to get over it. I didn’t want to become used to the fact that he’d died. That was the last thing I wanted. -After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell "You asked a question. I guess I'll have to answer. Maybe it's good and maybe it's bad to answer it. You're not clever. You don't now what you want. You have no proper fierceness. You let other people walk over you. Sometimes I think you're a weakling who will never amount to a dog turd. Does that answer your question? I love you better. I always have. This may be a bad thing to tell you, but it's true. I love you better. Else why would I have given myself the trouble of hurting you?' -John Steinbeck, East of Eden I'm looking for someone who will light candles, not just curse the darkness. -I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris Sometimes, when you don't ask questions, it's not because you are afraid that someone will lie to your face. It's because you're afraid they'll tell you the truth. - Vanishing Acts, by Jodi Picoult Just because lips have met doesn't mean hearts have joined. And just because two bodies are drawn to each other, doesn't mean two people are right for each other. -I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris She worried way too much what people thought of her, wore her heart on her sleeve, expected too much from people, and got hurt too easily. She kept people's secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did. -Rob Sheffield, Love Is A Mix Tape "But what I am thinking is this: that I wish I could freeze this moment, somehow delay my final decision, and just hang here in the balance of two places, two worlds, two loves." -Love the One You're With by Emily Giffin I hold that day deep within myself as a reminder that love is the sum of our choices, the strength of our commitments, the ties that bind us together." -Love the One You're With by Emily Giffin The night broke. The thunder cracked my brain finally. The rain is coming, I promise you. I didn’t mean to but your tears will bring life back. Purple flowers grow, the color blood looks in veins. They’ll sprout out of my chest. I promise you they’ll crack the ground, grow over the freeways, down the slopes to the sea. I’ll be in their faces. I’ll be in the waves, coming down on you from the sky. I’ll be inside the one who holds you. And then I won’t be. -Wasteland by Francesca Lia Block "Please, look all you wish. Books are like people. They do not bear loneliness well. Those that remain unnourished by another's touch wither and die. Here, hold it, read a little. So long as your hands are tolerably clean, that volume shall be grateful for your favour." --The Nature of Monsters, Clare Clark "And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar. It's always necessary." -Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer Because a real kiss, a kiss that two real people choose to give each other - it's something that can't be filmed or photographed or drawn, or even described with words. Because a kiss isn't what it looks like or how it feels. A real kiss happens down deep inside of two hearts at the same time. It's hidden away. A real kiss is invisible. -Things That Are by Andrew Clements The stranger says there are no more couches and he will have to sleep in your bed. You try to warn him, you tell him you will want to get inside him, and ruin him, but he doesn't listen. You do this, you do. You take the things you love and tear them apart or you pin them down with your body and pretend they're yours. So, you kiss him, and he doesn't move, he doesn't pull away, and you keep on kissing him. And he hasn't moved, he's frozen, and you've kissed him, and he'll never forgive you, and maybe now he'll never leave you alone. -Richard Siken, A Primer For the Small Weird Loves “People who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation.” -Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story by Chuck Klosterman But memories don't help. They can even get in the way. It seems to me that most of the time people use their memories to make their past life seem better than it was, or happier. Or just the opposite. They only remember the worst. Either way, memories aren't real. They're a kind of fiction, if you ask me. Anyhow, people make them into what they want them to be, and then believe their life was like that. But I want to know what my life really was, really is now not then. -aidan chambers, "the toll bridge" In LIFE as in LOVE, the closeness of another IS the soul of meaning, the sharing of intimacy, the touch of harmony, the completion of passion. She knew that better than anyone, and sacrificed herself for it. -Iain Wodehouse-Easton I wait here at the boundaries of dream, all shadow-wrapped. The dark air tastes of night, so cold and crisp, and I wait for my love. The moon has bleached the color from her stone. She'll come, and then we'll stalk this pretty world alive to darkness and the tang of blood. It is a lonely game, the quest for blood, but still, a body's got the right to dream and I'd not give it up for all the world. The moon has leeched the darkness from the night. I stand in shadows, staring at her stone: Undead, my lover . . . O, undead my love? I dreamt you while I slept today and love meant more to me than life -- meant more than blood. The sunlight sought me, deep beneath my stone, more dead than any corpse but still a-dream until I woke as vapor into night and sunset forced me out into the world. For many centuries I've walked the world dispensing something that resembled love -- a stolen kiss, then back into the night contented by the life and by the blood. And come the morning I was just a dream, cold body chilling underneath a stone. I said I would not hurt you. Am I stone to leave you prey to time and to the world? I offered you a truth beyond your dreams while all you had to offer was your love. I told you not to worry and that blood tastes sweeter on the wing and late at night. Sometimes my lovers rise to walk the night . . . Sometimes they lie, cold corpse beneath a stone, and never know the joys of bed and blood, of walking through the shadows of the world; instead they rot to maggots. O my love they whispered you had risen, in my dream. I've waited by your stone for half the night but you won't leave your dream to hunt for blood. Good night, my love. I offered you the world. -Vampire Sestina by Neil Gaiman "The more girls a boy has, the better. he has a bright look, having reaped fruits, blooming. he stalks around, sure-shouldered, and you have the feeling he's got more in him, a fatter heart, more stories to tell. for a girl. With each boy it's as though a petal gets plucked each time." -Lust, Susan Minot "After sex, you curl up like a shrimp, something deep inside you ruined ... after the briskness of loving, loving stops. and you roll over with death stretched out alongside you like a feather boa, or a snake, light as air, and you...you don't even ask for anything or try to say something to him because it's obviously your own damn fault. ... you open your legs but can't, or don't dare anymore, to open your heart." -Lust, Susan Minot She wants to gobble up time, to rush through days and weeks and years with him, so they can do everything right now. But, at the same time, she wants to freeze it: she knows enough about love to be aware of its double bind - that there's no love without pain, that you can't ever love someone without that tinge of dread at how it might end. -After You'd Gone, Maggie O'Farrell She had been right. The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live in. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness--and love. Books loved anyone who opened them, they gave you security and friendship and didn't ask anything in return; they never went away, never, not even when you treated them badly. -Cornelia Funke, Inkheart "People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their drams. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown." -Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes - the ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing that you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. -Here's to the Crazy Ones, by Jack Kerouac Shadows on the wall Noises down the hall Life doesn’t frighten me at all Bad dogs barking loud Big ghosts in a cloud Life doesn’t frighten me at all Don’t show me frogs and snakes And listen for my scream, If I’m afraid at all It’s only in my dreams. I’ve got a magic charm That I keep up my sleeve I can walk the ocean floor And never have to breathe. Life doesn’t frighten me at all Not at all Not at all. Life doesn’t frighten me at all. -Maya Angelou Sometimes you couldn't face the sadness of being forgotten until you felt the comfort of being remembered again. -The Last Summer (of You and Me) by Ann Brashares Let me love you, but don't love me back. Do love me and let me hate you for a while. Let me feel like I have some control, because I know I never do. -The Last Summer (of You and Me) by Ann Brashares "Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern." —"Mayakovsky," Frank O'Hara "I think that real friendship always makes us feel such sweet gratitude, because the world almost always seems like a very hard desert, and the flowers that grow there seem to grow against such high odds." -The Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. -Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray "We both know life is short.Too short to waste time with anyone who doesnt appreciate and value you." -The Truth About Forever ‘You’ll get over it. . .’ It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? -Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. that surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it. -Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes. -The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera “I don't pretend to know what love is for everyone, but I can tell you what it is for me; love is knowing all about someone, and still wanting to be with them more than any other person, love is trusting them enough to tell them everything about yourself, including the things you might be ashamed of, love is feeling comfortable and safe with someone, but still getting weak knees when they walk into a room and smile at you.” It's so hard to forget pain, but it's even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace. -Chuck Palahniuk, Diary All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired. -Chuck Palahniuk, Diary " You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew." -Wasteland, Francesca Lia Block Now I am not sure about that letter I sent. Not sure at all. For was I not the one who acquiesced, mutely responsive and receptive? Was I not guilty of letting a boy be drawn to self-hatred? And yet does it not all come again to the fact that it is a man's world? For if a man chooses to be promiscuous, he may still aesthetically turn up his nose at promiscuity. He may still demand a woman be faithful to him, to save him from his own lust. But women have lust, too. Why should they be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of the infants, feeder of soul, body, and pride of man? Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to spout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable femininity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars - to be a part of a scene, anonomous, listening, recording - all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstructed as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night... -from the Journals of Sylvia Plath "To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell." -Love in the Time of Cholera-Gabriel Gárcia Márquez Being a woman is a fate Sabina did not choose. What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure. Sabina believed that she had to assume the correct attitude to her unchosen fate. To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it. -The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera “ Perhaps love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself. “ — Antoine de Saint-Exupé The world is all backward. Everyone who is considered really hot, really isn't. It's like we're through the looking glass. Good is bad, bad is good. Black is white, white is black. People base their lives on convenient recollections and are considered sane. People who look too hard for the truth are considered crazy. -What Happened to Lani Garver by Carol Plum Ucci One of the reasons we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. but some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. and some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you. -Shantaram, Gregory David Roberts "If the soul is left in darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but the one who causes the darkness." -Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo "Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That's the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine. And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You'll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others. And once the storm is over you won't remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won't even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won't be the same person who walked in. That's what this storm's all about." -Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore He refused to give her what she wanted. She refused to take what he gave. - Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares. After that she spent a lot of time convincing herself that what you saw, even what you felt, had an unreliable relationship to what was actually there. What was actually there was reality, regardless of whether you saw it or how you felt about it. - Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood by Ann Brashares. "But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?" -Charles Baudelaire "I find myself moving like a knife, carving my way around people, cutting myself out of their picture and leaving nothing of myself behind but a hole." -Jack Gantos, Hole in My Life "The person you love and the person who loves you are never the same person." -Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters "Every movement I made was an effort of will and sometimes I wondered that no one noticed this." --Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea "In the coffin my room has become, I talk to God about the infrequency of rain about people who can't see the current gentleness running under the pale crust of my skin." --"Gravity" by Maura O'Connor "I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way." -How To Be Good by Nick Hornby “ I knew that there were no guarantees. No way of knowing what came next for me, for him, or anybody. Some things don’t last forever, but some things do. Like a good song, or a good book, or a good memory you can take out and unfold in your darkest times, pressing down the corners and peering in close, hoping you still recognize the person you see there." -This Lullaby, Sarah Dessen "You know how they say you only hurt the ones you love? Well, it works both ways." — Chuck Palahniuk [Fight Club] "Most times, it's just a lot easier not to let the world know what's wrong." — Chuck Palahniuk [Invisible Monsters] “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known." -I Corinthians 13:1 I remember love. It’s what I have to keep on reminding myself. It’s funny how you can forget everything except people loving you. Maybe that’s why humans find it so hard getting over love affairs. It’s not the pain they’re getting over, it’s the love. -Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta "This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs. It's us. Only us." Alan Moore, Watchmen "I'll write this all down for you," I said. "I'll put it in a story." I don't know if that's what he wanted to ask me, but it's something everybody wants--for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters. -The Secret Life of Bees- Sue Monk Kidd "I wonder what kind of person would come out if I ever did erase all my inhibitions at once, what kind of being is bottled up inside me now." -Something Happened by Joseph Heller She was a genius of sadness, immersing herself in it, separating its numerous strands, appreciating its subtle nuances. She was a prism through which sadness could be divided into its infinite spectrum. -Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others- the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life has unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad. -Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer “'You'll be sick of feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place. 'Old shelters—television, magazines, movies—won't protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That's when you'll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you've walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper. 'You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep. 'Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name. 'And then the nightmares will begin.'” -House Of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain? Is that was sadness is all about? Is it what comes over us when beautiful memories shatter in hindsight because the remembered happiness fed not just on actual circumstances but on a promise that was not kept? ~The Reader by Bernhard Schlink Does everyone feel this way? When I was young, I was perpetually overconfident or insecure. Either I felt completely useless, unattractive, and worthless, or that I was pretty much a success, and everything I did was bound to succeed. When I was confident, I could overcome the hardest challenges. But all it took was the smallest setback for me to be sure that I was utterly worthless. Regaining my self-confidence had nothing to do with success; every goal I set myself, every recognition I craved made anything I actually did seem paltry by comparison, and whether I experienced it as a failure or triumph was utterly dependent on my mood. ~The Reader by Bernhard Schlink What if the water that came out of the shower was treated with a chemical that responded to a combination of things like your heartbeat, and your body temperature, and your brian waves, so that your skin changed color according to your mood? If you were extremely excited your skin would turn green, and if you were angry you'd turn red, obviously, and if you felt like shiitake you'd turn brown, and if you were blue you'd turn blue. Everyone could know what everyone else felt, and we could be more careful with each other, because you'd never want to tell a person whose skin was purple that you're angry at her for being late, just like you would want to pat a pink person on the back and tell him, "Congratulations!" Another good reason it would be a good invention is that there are so many times when you know you're feeling a lot of something, but you don't know what something is. Am I frustrated? Am I actually just panicky? And that confusion changes your mood, it becomes your mood, and you become a confused, gray person. But with the special water, you could look at your orange hands and think, I'm happy! That whole time I was actually happy! What a relief!" -Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close "Sometimes you can't be what you ought to be, you can't have what you ought to have. And life changes. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. And at some point it just isn't worth trying to fix what went wrong." -Lincoln Rhyme, The Bone Collector "The love I've known is the love of two people staring not at each other, but in the same direction." -Frank Bidart, "To The Dead" "Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it." -The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot. -The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon "Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you." -The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruiz Zafon "You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present." -Looking For Alaska by John Green So it is…that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. - Norman F. Maclean, A River Runs Through It A kiss is a sign of love; but it is a giving of one's breath, or spirit, which is inseparable from life itself. The purpose of all love is to take the beloved into oneself to possess it, to become identified with it. ... But despite this desire to be one with the beloved, there must still be distinctness. If the other person were destroyed, there would be no love. Unity must not mean absorption or annihilation or destruction, but the fullness of one in the other. To be one without ceasing to be distinct, that is the paradox of love! -Three To Get Married by Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen "I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls." -Incest by Anais Nin The teeth at your bones are your own, the hunger is yours, forgiveness is yours. The sins of the fathers belong to you and to the forest and even to the ones in the iron bracelets, and here you stand, remembering their songs. Listen. Slide the weight from your shoulders and move forward. You are afraid you might forget, but you never will. You will forgive and remember. Think of the vine that curls from the small square plot that was once my heart. That is the only marker you need. Move on. Walk forward into the light. ~Barbara Kingsolver For all his wisdom, he did not know that love cannot be tested. Honesty can be tested, and loyalty. But there is no test for love. Love goes on forever, once it begins, even if we come to hate the one we love. Love goes on forever because love is born in the part of us that does not die. -Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love. Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief. I am trying to be truthful. - Carol Ann Duffy, Valentine “There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weights so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, with someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.” -The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. -Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of Baskervilles "Why is it that the most unoriginal thing we can say to one another is still the thing we long to hear? 'I love you' is always a quotation. You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it we speak like savages who have found three words and worship them." -Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson My darkness, are you lonely? Only listen, and I will listen to you. Only watch me, and I will watch into your eyes. Only know that I am awake and aware of you, only be my friend, and I will be your friend. You need not ever fear; or ever be lonely; or want for love. Tell me your secrets; you can trust me. Come near. Come very near. -A Death in the Family by James Agee By watching, I know that the stars are not going to last. I have seen some of the best ones melt and run down the sky. Since one can melt, they can all melt; since they can all melt, they can all melt the same night. That sorrow will come--I know it. I mean to sit up every night and look at them as long as I can keep awake; and I will impress those sparkling fields on my memory, so that by and by when they are taken away I can by my fancy restore those lovely myriads to the black sky and make them sparkle again, and double them by the blur of my tears. -The Diary of Adam and Eve, Mark Twain Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have. -Henry Rollins I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name; There is grief in the sound, there is guilt in the fame; But the tear that now burns on my cheek may impart The deep thoughts that dwell in that silence of heart. -I Speak Not, Lord Byron How could I not love this man? But it was the love of a ghost. Arms that encircled but did not touch. A bowl full of rice but without my appetite to eat it. No hunger. No fullness. -The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan "Maybe crying is a means of cleaning yourself out emotionally. Or maybe it's your communication of last resort; the only way to express yourself when words fail the same as when you were a baby and had no words." -Aristotle "She talked about wanting to be a part of something, wanting to be desired, to be 'special', craving to be loved. She talked about experiencing the kind of loneliness so immense it could swallow you up. She called it 'loneliness that crowds couldn't cure'." —Cupcake Brown "I miss you Louise. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. What then kills love? Only this: Neglect. Not to see you when you stand before me. Not to think of you in the little things. Not to make the road wide for you, the table spread for you. To choose you out of habit not desire, to pass the flower seller without a thought. To leave the dishes unwashed, make use of you at night. To crave another while pecking your cheek. To say your name without hearing it, to assume it is mine to call." -Written on the Body - J. W. A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants them to know just how badly they've all let him down. -nick hornby, a long way down “Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.” -Henry Rollins "I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love." -jonathan safran foer, extremely loud & incredibly close "You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how." -mark z. danielewski, house of leaves  blah |
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