March 2012
2 posts
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“Together we understood what terror was: you’re not human anymore. You’re a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believe in. You know you’re about to die. And it’s not a movie and you aren’t a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait. ”
- Tim...
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“Long, dark, and lovely she had been, in those days before her mind broke and the parts scattered and she let them go.”
-Daniel Woodrell
February 2012
78 posts
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“You’re in pretty good shape, for the shape you are in.”
-Dr. Seuss
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“She sang as if she was saving the life of every person in the room.”
-Ann Patchett
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“We all need someone to look at us.”
-Milan Kundera
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“You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.”
-Gary Shteyngart
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“He said she went around with her feelings out in front of her with an arm around the feelings’ windpipe and a Glock 9mm. to the feelings’ temple like a terrorist with a hostage, daring you to shoot.”
― David Foster Wallace
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“The beginning is always today.”
-Mary Shelley
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“The love I felt for her on that train ride had a capital and provinces, parishes and a Vatican, an orange planet and many sullen moons — it was systemic and it was complete.”
-Gary Shteyngart
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“She lived in a tiny shotgun apartment piled with dirty dishes, cat boxes, and open jars of clawed-at cold cream. Hurled pairs of pants tried to flee across the couch; wilted dresses snored on the kitchen chairs. The two cats tore the stuffing out of the couch and rolled toilet paper down the hall. During the day, Joy sat in this ragged nest like a princess, bathing in the kitchen with one...
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“What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where...”
– The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje (via writerinboston)
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“I’ve always known that there’s more going on inside me than finds its way into the world, but this is probably true of everyone. Who doesn’t regret that he isn’t more fully understood?”
-Richard Russo
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You were a kindness when I was a stranger But I wouldn’t ask for what I didn’t need Everything’s weird and we’re always in danger Why would you shatter somebody like me?
You Were A Kindness - The National
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“There was no one to call me to bed, no one to demand that the rhythms of my life operate in a duet.”
-Nicole Krauss
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“I’m about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don’t have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of this familiar sequence, which was, but I’m going to anyway.”
-Richard Russo
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“Years after I’d seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed… and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to…”
-Don DeLillo
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“He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. His time, what a bankrupt idea, as if he’s been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.”
-Margaret Atwood
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“There’s never really time to develop one’s ambitions. They just throw you out there and you grab on to something handy like an amateur, in terror. Hardly time to hide your cheap scotch and prepare a face. Pa, for instance, had chosen wrongly, rushed to life insurance when he wanted to be a cowboy.”
-Barry Hannah
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“I went to the guest room and pretended to write. I hit the space bar again and...”
– - Jonathan Safran Foer (via thebookishdark)
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“People took such awful chances with chemicals and their bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve. They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do. They didn’t own doodley-squat, so they couldn’t improve their surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful instead.”
-Kurt Vonnegut
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“He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing.”
-Mary Robison
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“No, we weren’t lovers, but in a way we had opened ourselves to each other even...”
– -Haruki Murakami(via verwardheid)
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“I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.”
-Lydia Davis
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“His sleep was a sensuous gluttony of oblivion.”
-P.D. James
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“It wasn’t torpor that kept her - she was often restless to the point of irritability. She simply liked to feel that she was prevented from leaving, that she was needed.”
-Ian McEwan
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“For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.”
-Joyce Carol Oates
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“I have tried hard — but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can...”
– -Edith Wharton (via ofravens)
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“Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny,...”
– -Henry Miller (via thisbeautifulwound)
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‘Oh, Mariachi Me’
All my life I have wanted nothing so much
as the love of women. For them I have fashioned
the myth of myself, the singing troubador
with the flashing eyes. Always for them
my black sombrero with its swinging tassels,
this vest embroidered with hearts, these trousers
with silver studs down the seams. Oh, I am
Mariachi me, as I had intended. I am success
and the price of...
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“To love or have loved, that is enough. Ask nothing further. There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life.”
-Victor Hugo
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“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the...”
– Søren Kierkegaard (via ofravens)
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“This person realizes that staying home means blowing off everyone this person has ever known. But the desire to stay in is very strong. This person wants to run a bath and then read in bed.”
-Miranda July
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“And you taught me what this feels like. And then how it feels to lose it. And...”
– (via wordsandlyrics)
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“This, perhaps, is how lives are measured, a series of abandonments that we hope beyond reason will eventually be reconciled.”
-Anthony Doerr
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“I believe in work. If somebody doesn’t create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. An awful lot of people feel that they’re treading water — that if they vanished in smoke, it wouldn’t mean anything at all in this world. And that’s a despairing and destructive feeling. It’ll kill you.”
-Arthur Miller
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“Not sleep, something richer: blissful annihilation. So he could forget the sideways throb of his flattened heart kicking: You. You. You. He kept the though of Elphaba there, unwillingly; it pressed painfully against membranes so interior he had never known their existence before. I hated you. You left me. So I hate you more than I used to.”
-Gregory Maguire
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“I’m not good at small talk; I’m not good at big talk; and medium talk just doesn’t come up.”
-Patty Marx