yum

weheartit - http://fashionsociety.tumblr.com/page/5

in december

(inspired by ialwayssayinterestingthings)

light

weheartit

i did see it.

postsecret

love

weheartit via http://kokakolaveins.wordpress.com/

audrey

ialwayssayinterestingthings (i think!)

yes

dog days

from a friend

"What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you."

Jeanette Winterson

balance

Listen, balance, my darling, is not letting anybody love you less than you love yourself.

- Eat Pray Love, the movie.

wandering

via happy accidents.

survival

It's funny how there are times when a girl gets knocked down and she thinks she'll never get up again, but she gets up quicker and stronger, and she survives things she couldn't have imagined surviving.

- The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone

give up

“When you’re a little kid, you’re a little bit of everything. Artist, scientist, athlete, scholar… Sometimes it seems like growing up is the process of giving those things up. One by one. I guess we all have one thing we regret giving up. One thing we really miss that we gave up because we were too lazy or, we couldn’t stick it out or, because we were afraid.”

- The Wonder Years

(via halfheartedly)

yum

via beyondbeyond

lovesong

He loved her and she loved him
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and Sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy place
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His word were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

Ted Hughes, 'Lovesong'

daylight savings

How It Happens

The sky said I am watching
to see what you
can make out of nothing
I was looking up and I said
I thought you
were supposed to be doing that
the sky said Many
are clinging to that
I am giving you a chance
I was looking up and I said
I am the only chance I have
then the sky did not answer
and here we are
with our names for the days
the vast days that do not listen to us

— W.S. MERWIN, poet laureate of the United States and author, most recently, of “The Shadow of Sirius,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2009

via nytimes

another one

come see

tea

via ffffound

fiction

We spent as much money as we could and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition. There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.

from Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

me like

(via ialwayssayinterestingthings)

excited about this

hip hop

i've fallen for JT a little more.

poem

(via even*cleveland)

LOVE

oscar de la renta.
via jezebel

lonely

“When you’re surrounded by all these people, it can be lonelier than when you’re by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don’t feel like you can trust anyone or talk to anybody, you feel like you’re really alone.”

- Fiona Apple

(via halfheartedly)

camera woman

one day. this will be me. but, you know, black.

(via ffffound)

don't miss it

(via ffffound)

must

“You must write every single day of your life. You must lurk in libraries to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. May you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”

- Ray Bradbury

(via quotebook)

kids

via ffffound

ha ha

via ffffound

video

see

“Can you see me? All of me? Probably not. No one ever really has.”

- Jeffrey Eugenides

(via half-heartedly)

monday

via icanread

this made me cry tonight

Hugh Laurie - Georgia On My Mind
Uploaded by kevmasterplayer6. - Explore more music videos.

ignorance

photo by me.

worse

never

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

- Sylvia Plath

ill

...we are all terminally ill, each breath and step and day one closer than the last...

- andre dubus, on charon's wharf

fly

(via ialwayssayinterestingthings)

hollywood

Welcome to Hollywood! What's your dream? Everybody comes here; this is Hollywood, land of dreams. Some dreams come true, some don't; but keep on dreamin' - this is Hollywood. Always time to dream, so keep on dreamin'.

- Pretty Woman

dotted

In his last four years he had seen any number of bedrooms like this, dotted around the city like crime scenes, rooms where you were never more than six feet from a Nina Simone album, and though he'd rarely seen the same bedroom twice, it was all too familiar.

- from One Day by David Nicholls

oh man

via chie

i want these oh so bad.
then i could make believe that i am a flamenco dancer.
as i listen to the songs i love so much.

you go girl

(via jezebel, via ap)

99

“Ninety-nine percent of the world’s lovers are not with their first choice. That’s what makes the jukebox play.”

- Willie Nelson (via quotebook)

through

alone

s.o.

“Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.”

- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

(via quotebook)

boston

I have just returned from Boston. It is the only thing to do if you find yourself up there.
Fred Allen

cupcake

(photo by me. don't steal it, k?)

“Imagine a new story for your life and start living it.”

- Paulo Coelho

(via quotebook)

memories

story

“Stories always tell us more than the mere words, and that is why we love to write it, and to read it.”

- Madeleine L’Engle

(via quotebook)

faded

I understand feeling as small and as insignificant as humanly possible. And how it can actually ache in places you didn't know you had inside you. And it doesn't matter how many new haircuts you get, or gyms you join, or how many glasses of chardonnay you drink with your girlfriends... you still go to bed every night going over every detail and wonder what you did wrong or how you could have misunderstood. And how in the hell for that brief moment you could think that you were that happy. And sometimes you can even convince yourself that he'll see the light and show up at your door. And after all that, however long all that may be, you'll go somewhere new. And you'll meet people who make you feel worthwhile again. And little pieces of your soul will finally come back. And all that fuzzy stuff, those years of your life that you wasted, that will eventually begin to fade.

- The Holiday

breakfast

(via ffffound)

Claire: You know, you look a lot better without all that black shit under your eyes.
Allison: Hey, I like all that black shit... Why are you being so nice to me?
Claire: Because you're letting me.

- The Breakfast Club

nina

I wouldn't ask you to lift up/This great big world little baby/I'm not that kind of a girl

from 'That's all I ask' off of Nina Simone's the Wild is the Wind album

eggs

“After that, it got pretty late and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her…and I thought of that old joke, you know, the, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, ‘Doc, uh, my brother’s crazy, he thinks he’s a chicken,’ and uh, the doctor says, ‘Well why don’t you turn him in?’ And the guy says, ‘I would, but I need the eggs.’ Well, I guess that’s pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd and - but uh, I guess we keep going through it…because…most of us need the eggs.”

- Annie Hall

(via quotebook)

flashback

rain

For lonely people, rain is a chance to be touched.
- From 'The Mute Ventriloquist' in The secret lives of people in love by Simon Van Booy

cry me

(via ffffound)

You drove me, nearly drove me, out of my head
While you never shed a tear
Remember, I remember, all that you said
You told me love was too plebeian
Told me you were through with me and
Now you say you love me
Well, just to prove that you do
Come on and cry me a river
Cry me a river
I cried a river over you.

- 'cry me a river' by arthur hamilton

lemon

(via quotebook)

protection

I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.
- Susan B. Anthony

night

"Night can unmoor so many feelings; it is a relief we sleep through.
Night unravels the day and reinvents it for the first time.
We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wile benevolent garden filled with meetings and unexplained departures."
- "Everything is a Beautiful Trick" from The secret lives of people in love by Simon Van Booy

pretty

i love this post. you should go.

still

'And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it.'

- pg. 72 of Tinkers by Paul Harding

it had to be done

Good morning. In less than an hour, aircraft from here will join others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. "Mankind." That word should have new meaning for all of us today. We can't be consumed by our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interests. Perhaps it's fate that today is the Fourth of July, and you will once again be fighting for our freedom... Not from tyranny, oppression, or persecution... but from annihilation. We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

- Independence Day

:)

Fuck-a-doodle-doo!
-Four Weddings and a Funeral

snoop

via halfheartedly

despite the vulgarity, i love my snoop dogg.

even if

(it reads: love is always in your heart even if the one you love has gone away)

a dress from topshop

a photo by me

ride

pack rats

"Watching his eyes, I suddenly had an idea of how adults can hold on to a feeling for very long periods of time, long after the event is finished, long after cards have been sent and apologies made and everyone else had moved on. Adults were pack rats of old, useless emotions."
-The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, by Reif Larsen

summer

In Summer
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Oh, summer has clothed the earth
In a cloak from the loom of the sun!
And a mantle, too, of the skies' soft blue,
And a belt where the rivers run.

And now for the kiss of the wind,
And the touch of the air's soft hands,
With the rest from strife and the heat of life,
With the freedom of lakes and lands.

I envy the farmer's boy
Who sings as he follows the plow;
While the shining green of the young blades lean
To the breezes that cool his brow.

He sings to the dewy morn,
No thought of another's ear;
But the song he sings is a chant for kings
And the whole wide world to hear.

He sings of the joys of life,
Of the pleasures of work and rest,
From an o'erfull heart, without aim or art;
'T is a song of the merriest.

O ye who toil in the town,
And ye who moil in the mart,
Hear the artless song, and your faith made strong
Shall renew your joy of heart.

Oh, poor were the worth of the world
If never a song were heard,—
If the sting of grief had no relief,
And never a heart were stirred.

So, long as the streams run down,
And as long as the robins trill,
Let us taunt old Care with a merry air,
And sing in the face of ill.

lesson learned

“Let that be a lesson to you, sweetie. Never love anything”

- Homer J. Simpson
(via quotebook)

in two

(via icanread)

i honestly think we are two different people in one. two voices. two decisions. two ways of living.

father

(postsecret)

philly

(photo by me)

moon

I'm Over the Moon
by Brenda Shaughnessy

I don't like what the moon is supposed to do.
Confuse me, ovulate me,

spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient
date-rape drug. So I'll howl at you, moon,

I'm angry. I'll take back the night. Using me to
swoon at your questionable light,

you had me chasing you,
the world's worst lover, over and over

hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight.
But you disappear for nights on end

with all my erotic mysteries
and my entire unconscious mind.

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It's like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone. I'm going to write hard
and fast into you moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn't understand.
You with no swampy sexual

promise but what we glue onto you.
That's not real. You have no begging

cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch
sucked. No lacerating spasms

sending electrical sparks through the toes.
Stars have those.

What do you have? You're a tool, moon.
Now, noon. There's a hero.

The obvious sun, no bulls hit, the enemy
of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures.

But my lovers have never been able to read
my mind. I've had to learn to be direct.

It's hard to learn that, hard to do.
The sun is worth ten of you.

You don't hold a candle
to that complexity, that solid craze.

Like an animal carcass on the road at night,
picked at by crows,

haunting walkers and drivers. Your face
regularly sliced up by the moving

frames of car windows. Your light is drawn,
quartered, your dreams are stolen.

You change shape and turn away,
letting night solve all night's problems alone.

(www.poets.org)

oleander

“Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want.”

- White Oleander (via quotebook)

two

It appears that many of us struggle regularly with polar opposite characters holding court inside our heads. In fact, just about everyone I speak with is keenly aware that they have conflicting parts of their personality. Many of us speak about how our head (left hemisphere) is telling us to do one thing while our heart (right hemisphere) is telling us to do the exact opposite...
- My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D.

love

i love this guy's style.
blue. polka dots. stripes. cool tatto0.

(via the sartoralist, via ialwayssayinterestingthings)

crazy

"We're crazy, but we're trying." - my student on her family

the way i feel

(via i can read)

(via ialwayssayinterestingthings)

naked

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public”

- Paulo Coelho

--

“Everyone of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads—at least that’s where I imagine it—there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own little private library."

- Haruki Murakami

(via quotebook)

kiss

“Kiss me and you will see how important I am.”

- Sylvia Plath

(via quotebook)

amen

“I like people but I like them in short bursts. I don’t like people in extended periods of time. I’m alright with them for a little while but once you get up past around a minute, minute and a half, I gotta get the fuck out of there. And my reason for this… one that you may share possibly… I have a very low tolerance for stupid bullshit.” - George Carlin

(via ialwaysayinterestingthings)

run

"There is something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time."
-Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

(via quotebook)

silence

Night and silence. -- Who is here?

-Puck, A Midsummer Night's Dream

start

"Do You Have Any Advice For Those of Us Just Starting Out?"

Ron Koertge

Give up sitting dutifully at your desk. Leave
your house or apartment. Go out into the world.

It's all right to carry a notebook but a cheap
one is best, with pages the color of weak tea
and on the front a kitten or a space ship.

Avoid any enclosed space where more than
three people are wearing turtlenecks. Beware
any snow-covered chalet with deer tracks
across the muffled tennis courts.

Not surprisingly, libraries are a good place to write.
And the perfect place in a library is near an aisle
where a child a year or two old is playing as his
mother browses the ranks of the dead.

Often he will pull books from the bottom shelf.
The title, the author's name, the brooding photo
on the flap mean nothing. Red book on black, gray
book on brown, he builds a tower. And the higher
it gets, the wider he grins.

You who asked for advice, listen: When the tower
falls, be like that child. Laugh so loud everybody
in the world frowns and says, "Shhhh."

Then start again.

meal

“Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.”

- Jim Rohn

(via quotebook)

snapshot

(via thresca)

awesome wall paper
(via designsponge)

freedom

“Now that she had nothing to lose, she was free.”

- Paulo Coelho

(via quotebook)

tidbit

i sang this with a student today.

love

“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”

- Oscar Wilde

(via quote-book.tumblr.com)

fat

The Hymn of a Fat Woman

Joyce Huff

All of the saints starved themselves.
Not a single fat one.
The words “deity” and “diet” must have come from the same
Latin root.

Those saints must have been thin as knucklebones
or shards of stained
glass or Christ carved
on his cross.

Hard
as pew seats. Brittle
as hair shirts. Women
made from bone, like the ribs that protrude from his wasted
wooden chest. Women consumed
by fervor.

They must have been able to walk three or four abreast
down that straight and oh-so-narrow path.
They must have slipped with ease through the eye
of the needle, leaving the weighty
camels stranded at the city gate.

Within that spare city’s walls,
I do not think I would find anyone like me.

I imagine I will find my kind outside
lolling in the garden
munching on the apples.

create

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”

- Mary Lou Cook

(via quotebook)

hate

Hate Poem

Julie Sheehan

I hate you truly. Truly I do.
Everything about me hates everything about you.
The flick of my wrist hates you.
The way I hold my pencil hates you.
The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped
in the jaws of a moray eel hates you.
Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.

Look out! Fore! I hate you.

The blue-green jewel of sock lint I’m digging
from under by third toenail, left foot, hates you.
The history of this keychain hates you.
My sigh in the background as you explain relational databases
hates you.
The goldfish of my genius hates you.
My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors.

A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious
symbol of how I hate you.

My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate.
My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate.
My pleasant “good morning”: hate.
You know how when I’m sleepy I nuzzle my head
under your arm? Hate.
The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit
practices it.
My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning
to night hate you.
Layers of hate, a parfait.
Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate,
I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one
individually and at leisure.
My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity
of my hate, which can never have enough of you,
Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.

via Poetry 180

decision

“I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.”

- Eleanor Roosevelt

(quotebook)

mesmerize

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity.

Haruki Murakami - The Paris Review, Summer 2004

(via daily routines)

(via half-heartedly)

care

(via thresca)

i lost it

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

ride

The Rider

by Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

lost

(via i always say interesting things)

prescience

Prescience
by Maya Angelou

Had I known that the heart
breaks slowly, dismantling itself
into unrecognizable plots of misery

Had I known the heart would leak,
slobbering its sap, with a vulgar
visibility, into the dressed-up
dining rooms of strangers,

Had I known that solitude could
stifle the breath, loosen the joint,
and force the tongue against the
palate,

Had I known that loneliness could
keloid, winding itself around the
body in an omninous and beautiful
cicatrix,

Had I known yet I would have loved
you, your brash and insolent beauty,
your heavy comedic face
and knowledge of sweet delights,

But from a distance
I would have left you whole and wholly
for the delectation of those who
wanted more and cared less

finis

Finis
by Waring Cuney

Now that our love has drifted
To a quiet close,
Leaving the empty ache
That always follows when beauty goes;
Now that you and I,
Who stood tiptoe on earth
To touch our fingers to the sky,
Have turned away
To allow our little love to die—
Go, dear, seek again the magic touch.
But if you are wise,
As I shall be wise,
You will not again
Love overmuch.

bright star

Fanny Brawne: I still don't know how to work out a poem.
John Keats: A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving into a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore but to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is a experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept the mystery.
Fanny Brawne: I love mystery.

from Bright Star

write

Write to write. Don’t say you’re a writer if you’re not writing. You’re not a writer, and who cares anyway, if you’re not writing. Even if you’re writing, don’t call yourself a writer. Say, instead, “I write.” It's the verb that's important, not the noun. “I haven’t been able to write,” people say to me all the time. “No, actually,” I respond, “You have been able to write, but you have chosen not to.” They usually walk away unhappy. We are always – ALWAYS – in choice. If you have a napkin and a pencil nub or a piece of dirt on a stick, you can write. Don’t let the “writer” take precedence over the “writing.” Let go of outcome. Forget blog statistics and the endless “freebies” that have sprouted online. Why does your blog need to lead anywhere? What’s all this striving about? Don’t search endlessly for a book deal before you’ve even written anything. Go back to #2: sit the hell down and write. Sit alone with yourself and a piece of paper without thinking about an audience, your database, the best way to market using social media.

(via feministing, originally posted on 37 days by patti digh)

greed

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.”

- Simone de Beauvoir

(via quotebook)

not

Do not write. I am sad, and want my light put out.

from 'apart (les separes)'

wild

if you want to leave, take good care...

imagination

Come with me
And you'll be
In a world of
Pure imagination...

aha!

(via ffffound.com, by jessica hische)

a gift from a friend

flor·i·le·gi·um
(flôr'ə-lē'jē-əm, flōr'-)
n. pl. flor·i·le·gi·a (-jē-ə)
A collection of excerpts from written texts, especially works of literature.

[New Latin flōrilegium, flower-gathering (translation of Greek anthologion, flower-gathering, anthology), from Latin flōrilegus, gathering flowers : flōs, flōr-, flower; see flower + legere, to gather; see leg- in Indo-European roots.]

as my friend wrote: I really like it because it actually means flower-gathering, but for beautiful pieces of writing!

(via half-heartedly)

hate

"I'm all done with hating you," I said. "It's all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don't hate them very long."

- The Lady in the Lake, Raymond Chandler

what i needed

"I felt the suffocating pressure to feel happiness most acutely in my 20s, when my parents made their hope for me clear: We just want you to be happy, they'd say. And listen, I am deeply aware and grateful that they weren't saying, "We want you to settle down" or "Find a more lucrative profession." Their hopes for me were noble and generous. But I remember knowing at the time that "happy" was the one thing I could not be at that particular point. I could pay the rent, do my job, try not to get too drunk or go home with anyone dangerous, meet nice people, attempt to cobble together the foundation of an adult life that might hold something -- Work? Home? Friends? Money? Marriage? Kids? -- that might one day yield something closer to contentment. But at that point, I could not be happy, at least not on a regular basis. I was too filled with fear -- about future, about money, about loneliness."

Screw Happiness by Rebecca Traister

favorite things

a print from kari herer's store.

(via Design*Sponge)

true

“All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you’ve read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and it belongs to you forever:the happiness and unhappiness, the good and evil, ecstasy and sorrow, the food, wine, beds, people and weather. If you can give that to reader, then you’re a writer.”

- Ernest Hemingway

““I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? …we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us”

- Franz Kafka

(via quotebook)

i must remember

The expert at anything was once a beginner. - Hayes

scarred

““Scars remind us of where we’ve been, they don’t have to dictate where we’re going””

- Agent Rossi “Criminal Minds”

(via quotebook)

choose me!

THE ONLY THING THAT CAN STOP THIS ASTEROID IS YOUR LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE
BY MICHAEL LACHER

"...Sure, we've got dozens of astronauts, physicists, and demolitions experts. I'll be damned if we didn't try to train our best men for this mission. But just because they can fly a shuttle and understand higher-level astrophysics doesn't mean they can execute a unique mission like this. Anyone can learn how to land a spacecraft on a rocky asteroid flying through space at twelve miles per second. I don't need some pencilneck with four Ph.D's, one-thousand hours of simulator time, and the ability to operate a robot crane in low-Earth orbit. I need someone with four years of broad-but-humanities-focused studies, three subsequent years in temp jobs, and the ability to reason across multiple areas of study. I need someone who can read The Bell Jar and make strong observations about its representations of mental health and the repression of women. Sure, you've never even flown a plane before, but with only ten days until the asteroid hits, there's no one better to nuke an asteroid..."

mcsweeney's

eat

haven, heaven


(via ffffound.com)

--

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

from Mark Strand's Eating Poetry

student teacher

“I will learn from myself, be my own student.”

-
Herman Hesse Siddhartha “Awakening”

(via quotebook)

thin line

"I didn’t know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It’s huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it’s proved right it grows a little more monstrous."

-Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

(via quotebook)

--
“Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations”

- Vladimir Nabokov

(via twentythree)


p.s. today i wrote a poem. a poem about the number 15.

for summer nights

two one liners

"That's your story," I said. "I don't have to get stuck with it."

--

A quiet girl, with a face that kept its secrets.


- Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

snapshots

Don't bother trying to read between the lines, and don't look for a through-line. There are no lines--only snapshots, most out of focus.
-Stephen King, On Writing

newsflash

Here's a newsflash: men are occasionally lonely, too. Where are the surveys asking them what they think the ideal age is to marry and have babies? Personally, I'm waiting for the "study" that shows Ms Right is so busy pursuing her career that Mr Right needs stop playing his Wii and go find her.
- Sarah Churchwell, 'Bridget Jones' survey sends women back to the end of reason

don't know why it is in my head

Gina: Well "Sinead O'Rebellion." Shock me shock me shock me with that deviant behavior.
Debra: God, that is so clever. I swear you get smarter the shorter your skirt gets.
Gina: And you get smarter the shorter your hair gets, so it's probably a good thing you went with that.
- Empire Records

gonna

i wish i had had this way last year.

broken

“And yet, as happy as you are to be with her again, you know that you musn’t overburden her with your troubles, that you can’t expect her to transform herself into the divine surgeon who will cut open your chest and mend your ailing heart. You must help yourself. If something inside of you is broken, you must put it back together with your own two hands.”

- Paul Auster, Invisible

(via quotebook)

talk

The Talker
Chelsea Rathburn

The details of his story aren’t the point,
nor is the listener, who looked as bored
as we, two accidental eavesdroppers
in a London restaurant. The point is, well,
his point, which after ten long minutes
he came to abruptly, and with a flourish,
saying slowly and in perfect seriousness,
“All we are is dust in the wind. All
we are. Is dust. In the wind.” I think
we bit our fingers to keep from laughing,
I know we mocked him through Paris, Barcelona,
Rome, and even years later, when one
of us became a little too serious,
the other would turn and quote his quote again,
jabbing the air as he had jabbed the air.
I picture him still sitting in some café,
proclaiming we were always born to run
or urging wayward sons to carry on
the way we tried to carry on, the couple
at the next table who couldn’t help b

erase

“You can erase someone from your mind. Getting them out of your heart is another story”

- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

double

In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?
- Rainer Maria Rilke

via quotebook

--

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win...
-Stephen King

via criminal minds

myself

Love After Love
Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

hot

There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.
-Sylvia Plath

music from runaway bride

I thought that you'd be loving me.
I thought you were the one who'd stay forever.
But now forever's come and gone
And I'm still here alone.

'Cause you were only playing,
You were only playing with my heart.
I was never waiting,
I was never waiting for the tears to start.

blue eyes blue - eric clapton

kittens

She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don't care much about kittens.
-Raymond Chandler, The Lady in the Lake

booklove

by coffeeandsugar, via icanread

like the song, not the video

i saw her last night in montreal. molly johnson. rain.

alone

“The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.”

- Albert Einstein

found with the help of quotebook

pillow talk

god, do i know the feeling.

(via ialwayssayinterestingthings)

reading

from reading lolita in tehran by azar nafisi-

'During their courtship they wrote letters and read poetry to each other. They became addicted to the secure world they created through words, a conspiratorial world in which everything that was hostile and uncontrollable became soft and articulated.' pg 68

'This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing. I just want you to remember this. That is all; class dismissed.' pg 111

hits home

When I Think
Jeanne Marie Beaumont

about how naive I was though never
admitting it, how badly I chose early on
spending my affections carelessly as
spare change then making quick getaways
igniting the bridges—or when I think of the time
wasted brooding and stewing, my heart a sort of
crock-pot simmering bitterness, it’s good to be
grown-up at last with boxes of journals I’m unlikely
to get back to and albums of photos as a very
selective mnemonic aid as though most of life
had been a string of holidays, reunions, bright
birthday parties when of course it’s dreary Mondays,
Friday nights watching old black-and-white movies,
hands ink stained from the newspaper, waits
at the post office, subways, trips to the drugstore,
thousands of bowls of cereal, pots of soup...

crusade

(via ffffound, via designworklife)

love this

from the daily emails i get with poetry.

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell
by Marty McConnell

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl.
you have an apartment
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away
your cracked past, your
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying
to disappear as revenge. and you
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.
heart leaking something so strong
they can smell it in the street.

ha

“Boyfriends and literature: How can you make a life out of those two things? As it turns out, I did; more literature than boyfriends lately, but I guess you can’t have everything.”

- Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
(quotebook)

courage

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.”

- e.e. cummings

sea

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clearing, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in the abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.”

- The Awakening, Kate Chopin (read before, but read again on quotebook)

monday i discovered i wanted the sea
i swam in a sea of blue
and woke up in the waves of white

up

(taken by me)

sometimes you just need a new perspective.

and a poem to read