“
there are twenty four ribs
that supposedly protect
your heart from damage,
but i swear you know
the precise location of
each 4 cm gap, know
how to nick the arteries
and slip into my circulation,
virtually undetected until
the x-rays show you
lighting up my body
like a christmas tree.
“
One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one’s words.
Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary (via awritersruminations)
(via courcel)
“
I felt a tremendous distance between me and everything real.
“
Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn’t it such a relief to have somebody say that?
Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country (via vonnegutphile)
(via booklover)
“
To be able to talk to your heart’s content about a book you like with someone who feels the same way about it is one of the greatest joys that life can offer.
Haruki Murakami (via murakamistuff)
(via booklover)
“
Even now I’m not really sure which parts of myself are real and which parts are things I’ve gotten from books.
“
Don’t worry. The acne will go away, sort of.
You will stop fighting with your sisters when they go
to college. This will be because of two things: your inability
to steal their clothing and the realization
that they are older, cooler versions of you. Your bully
will end up shaving her head and going to jail
or she will become a lawyer and have a nice car
and six babies. You will have no idea. You will forget
what she looks like, remember her the way
one remembers a splinter. You will stop
loving sharp things. You will learn how to make
your bed without being forced or threatened.
You will break up with your high school
sweetheart. I know, this is a surprise
but trust me. It is the right thing.
Yes, he loves you but it is a smothering love,
the way a dog nurses an open wound, all bared teeth
and tongues. When you leave him,
it will not feel like crushing a light bulb
in your hand — more like slowly, so slowly,
removing glass from inside your palm.
For years after him, you will let your heart
hang open like a soup kitchen. This is not
a bad thing, more a lesson in proportions.
After graduation, you will change a hundred
times over, like a revolving door, a waterfall.
One day, you will learn how to give
and receive love like an open window
and it will feel like summer every day.
One day, everything will make sense.
Sierra DeMulder, “Reassurance to Sierra in High School” (via fleurishes)
Real Estate
I have emotions
that are like newspapers that
read themselves.
I go for days at a time
trapped in the want ads.
I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house:
18 rooms
$37,000
I’m yours
ghosts and all.
Richard Brautigan
(via courcel)
“
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
“
We had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, ‘be happy Henry!’
and she was right: it’s better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn’t
understand what was attacking him from within.
My mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: ‘Henry, smile!
why don’t you ever smile?’
and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw
one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled.
Charles Bukowski, “A Smile to Remember” (via beautyisanillusion)
(via beautyisanillusion)
“
There are some words that once spoken will split the world in two. There would be the life before you breathed them and then the altered life after they’d been said. They take a long time to find, words like that. They make you hesitate. Choose with care. Hold on to them unspoken for as long as you can just so your world will stay intact.
“
I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded; not with the fanfare of epiphany, but with pain gathering its things, packing up, and slipping away unannounced in the middle of the night.
Khaled Hosseini (via troubled)
“
He stepped down, trying not too look long at her, as if she were the sun, yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (via wingsforlashes)
(via booklover)
