Tuesday, June 15, 2010

It’s 4 am. It’s that time when you don’t really understand your own ideas. The coffee makes you cringe a little but you keep drinking because perhaps you can stay awake all night? You know you won’t. You contemplate wheather you should write anything else. Also, there is a brief uncertainty about the spelling of whether.

Once I was beautiful, now I am myself. - Anne Sexton

I can to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren't alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not."

If you don't find a way to create a wall between [writing] and the world, the world will always win.
-Jonathan Safran Foer

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don’t, you have no business being a writer 0Will Self

No one is free. Even the birds are chained to the sky.

"For eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. Of course not all books are suitable for mealtime reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table. What one wants is a gossipy, formless book which can be opened anywhere" - C. S. Lewis

Every New Year feels this way to me. So much pressure to find something fun to do, so many people to spend time with and make calls to and send texts at the stroke of midnight and then a few moments later, everyone has gone home and things are quiet, and I’m sitting there looking at the floor saying “so this is the new year"
-Ben Gibbard

The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.
-William Lyon Phelps

When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.

-Gertrude Stein

sometimes I thought about nothing & sometimes I thought about my life. at least I made a living. what kind of living? a living. I lived. it wasn’t easy. & yet. I found out how little is unbearable.
-the history of love nicole krauss

Books are notes from the field, bound and domesticated, life brought into narrow focus… Every one is a brick keeping the building standing. Books are my life. I leave and come back, and the books I find there tell me I’m home. - Joshua Ferris

"We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading"
B. F. Skinner

There is no separation between the fallen and the stars
The broken is beautiful

Life's disappoointments are harder to take when you don't know any curse words.
-Calvin and Hobbes

A poem is a small…machine made of words…It’s movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
-W.C. Williams

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.
-Nora Ephron

when I do poems, it eats up the whole day in a slow lust which I can’t resist.

-sylvia plath, february 1956

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default." - J. K. Rowling

All books are either dreams or swords,
You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

-Amy Lowell

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined. Oh, dare to do it, Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much overexcited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a story, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.
Love, S.

Only when the last tree
Has been cut down
And the last river
Has dried to a trickle
Will man finally realise
That we cannot eat money
And reciting old proverb
Makes you sound like a twat
-Banksy

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