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)