January 2012
71 posts
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December 2011
63 posts
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“In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.”
-Marcel Proust
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“Against the background of general freakishness the case of my particular freakishness was lost.”
-Witold Gombrowicz
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“It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.”
-Kafka
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“And she understood as I did that when you sat down and put your hands on the...”
– Homer and Langley, E. L. Doctorow (via clavicola)
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“If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?”
-Rumi
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“Basically, I realized I was living in that awful stage of life between twenty-six and thirty-seven known as stupidity. It’s when you don’t know anything, not even as much as you did when you were younger, and you don’t even have a philosophy about all the things you don’t know, the way you did when you were twenty or would again when you were thirty-eight.”
-Lorrie...
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“Someone who is very strong has to be very nice also.”
-Astrid Lindgren
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“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”
- Charles Dickens
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“It makes one’s mouth hurt to speak with such forced merriment. It embarrasses me to hear people talk this way. I think I’ll be a low-key sort of elf. Twenty-two thousand people came to see Santa today, and not all of them are well-behaved.
Today, I witnessed fist fights and vomiting and magnificent tantrums. The back hallway was jammed with people. There was a line for Santa...
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“And so I begin to wonder whether I am big or small, because some people say I am a big girl and some that I am a small girl. Perhaps I am just right!”
- Astrid Lindgren
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“I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not...”
– Jonathan Safran Foer (via worldsspinningimliving)
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“I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark, and that...”
– -Virginia Woolf in The Hours
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“Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn’t know this either, but love don’t make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and *die*....
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“I knew all this, I understood the rules, but still, nothing broke my heart like the slow death of a shared joke that had once seemed genuinely funny.”
- Curtis Sittenfeld
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“The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—it does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is a beast running on chance and death, careening from nowhere to nowhere. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our lives.”
― Annie Dillard
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“How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.”
-Julian Barnes
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“There are a thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.”
-Marilynne Robinson
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“His despair had not come from the fact that he was a fool; he knew he was a fool. His despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker, a copier of bad verse from two-penny religous magazines, an epileptic, and could find no reason to turn her head and see him as something better.”
-Paul Harding
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“I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.”
-Joan Didion
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“Sometimes a thing that’s hard is hard because you’re doing it wrong.”
-Don Delillo
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“This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
-Ian McEwan
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“If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.”
-Evelyn Waugh
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“…I turned out to be the man she loved…To this day I don’t know exactly what she loved about me and that’s because I don’t have to know. She just does. It was the entire menu of myself. She ordered all of it.”
- Charles Baxter
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“That idea is strange to me. People keep on loving. People keep on loving even if...”
– -Camilla Gibb (via atomos)
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“See the darkness is leaking from the cracks. I cannot contain it. I cannot...”
– Sylvia Plath, excerpt from Three Women. (via askios)
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“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
-A.A. Milne
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“Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants.”
-Karl Lagerfeld
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“People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a...”
– -Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth (via chelsahhdelic)
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“Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.”
-Dorothy Allison
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“Not everyone is born a witch or a saint. Not everyone is born talented, or crooked, or blessed; some are born definite in no particular at all. We are a fountain of shimmering contradictions, most of us. Beautiful in the concept, if we’re lucky, but frequently tedious or regrettable as we flesh ourselves out.”
-Gregory Maguire
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"It is often hard to bear the tears that we...
-Marcel Proust
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“What’s agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn’t care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you… You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you. The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do...
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“I wanted a settled life and a shocking one. Think of Van Gogh, cypress trees and church spires under a sky of writhing snakes.”
-Michael Cunningham
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“Sometimes I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am. I’ve gone...”
– -David Wojnarowicz (via funeraire)
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“I noticed then that the red-haired woman was buying the food you eat when you live alone: a box of cereal, a few apples, a plastic container of plain yogurt….With an abrupt clarity, I saw how I had been launched into another category. I had been the red-haired woman; for a decade of my adult life, I had bought cereal and yogurt, I’d stood near couples and watched them nuzzle,...
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“The special hush of lobby carpet…”
-David Foster Wallace
“The rubber smooch of the refrigerator door.”
-Sam Lipsyte
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“A pier is a disappointed bridge.”
-Julian Barnes
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“There is a kind of crying I hope you have not experienced, and it is not just...”
– -Lemony Snicket (via coello)