Mary Oliver. [25 Jul 2008|08:31pm] greatpoets [justspies] The Uses of Sorrow (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. post comment

from Orion's Glow, by Alejandro Rossi (translated by Alita Kelley) [25 Jul 2008|05:32pm] literaryquotes [xplodingplastic] No, she wasn't beautiful; you should never measure a man's love by his woman's beauty. We fall in love with a gesture, with a voice, with those things that tell us we've found a soul that runs parallel to our own. I used to wonder how she could be so attractive, since her nose was big. Now, I'd swear she was a woman without hidden doubts, one that would never ask you, if you follow, how to get a cork out of a bottle, but one who wouldn't worry either if your grandfather never said a word for three nights. A woman who never wonders if things might have been different. A woman for whom the greatest offence would have been for someone to put in doubt the happiness of her too brief nights with Francisco. She was neither a lapdog nor a pampered cat, Lorenzo, even if she had that age-old way of looking on men askance. Have I given you an idea of how extraordinarily intelligent she was? Photographs from those days are so conventional, they couldn't do her justice, they don't show her alertness, her tremendous capacity for enjoyment. post comment

[25 Jul 2008|01:05pm] literaryquotes [woodstockmajere] I wish a wild sea-fellow would come down the glittering shingle, A soulless neckar, with winking seas in his eyes And falling waves in his arms, and the lost soul's kiss On his lips: I long to be soulless, I tingle To touch the sea in the last surprise Of fiery coldness, to be gone in a lost soul's bliss. -"Tarantella" by D.H. Lawrence 1 comment|post comment

Heinrich Böll's Billiards at Half-past Nine [25 Jul 2008|12:57pm] literaryquotes [porce_lain] "I was David, the little man with the sling, and Daniel, the little man in the lion's den and I was ready to accept the unpredictability I longed for." "Down with the honor of our fathers and our grandfathers and our great grandfathers." post comment

[25 Jul 2008|09:41am] literaryquotes [yourbitterhero] Jack Daniel's and Ginger Ale and another Bell's and another Bell's. I am drinking and spitting and screaming and dancing between two different worlds and oh I guess that's about it really. I'm telling you now for real I'm telling you that's my life this second and there's nothing more than life this second unless fuck it unless you count the shit of the past and the death of the future and the shit you forgot and the pain you remember and the dreams that you stifle the music you make the life you surrender the world you're resigned to the job that'll kill you the girls who don't like you the dad who left you the mom who raised you the schools that fail you the stepdad who saved you the dreams that mock you the death that awaits you the love that escapes you and the love that'll find you in a world that just fucking doubts you and the pain of this second the pain of this second the pain of the next one too. Bryan Charles, Grab Onto Me Tightly As If I Knew The Way 3 comments|post comment

[25 Jul 2008|01:38pm] literaryquotes [petite_star] If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house. It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you. It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note. Jon McGregor - If nobody speaks of remarkable things. 15 comments|post comment

24. [25 Jul 2008|07:28pm] literaryquotes [feirith] You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired. You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for. - Richard Siken 22 comments|post comment

[25 Jul 2008|04:28am] literaryquotes [strinky] [ music | Ave Maria - Josh Groban ] It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. - John Steinbeck, East of Eden 6 comments|post comment

Rent Girl by Michelle Tea [25 Jul 2008|01:35am] literaryquotes [chreid] [ mood | sick ]      I was twenty-one years old but inside I felt thirty, thirty-one. I hated revealing my age to anyone because it gave them the wrong idea about me. It gave them the idea that I was young when inside I felt ageless, that I didn’t know much when really I knew more then they did. I thought that I felt thirty-one, thirty-two years old, but I was wrong Now that I am thirty-two I can feel how it feels and it does not feel twenty-one So I was the sort of twenty-one year old who believes that deep in their soul they are thirty, thirty-five, which really is such a twenty-one year old way to think. post comment

Neil Gaiman, "American Gods" [24 Jul 2008|11:40pm] literaryquotes [zbg97] [ mood | contemplative ] [ music | Moby -- "Living" ]      No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong.  If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each others' tragedies.  We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories.  The shape does not change:  there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died.  There.  You may fill in the details from your own experience.  As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life.  Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod?  I mean, really looked at them?  There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique.      Without individuals we see only numbers:  a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million."  With individual stories, the statistics become people - but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless.  Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly, and the flies that crawl at the corner of his eyes, his skeletal limbs:  will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears?  To see him from the inside?  And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister, who lies in the searing dust beside him, a distorted, distended caricature of a human child?  And there, if we feel for them, are they now more important to us than a thousand other children touched by the same famine, a thousand other young lives who will soon be food for the flies' own myriad squirming children?      We draw our lines around these moments of pain, and remain upon our islands, and they cannot hurt us.  The are covered with a smooth, safe, nacreous later to let them slip, pearlike, from our souls without real pain.       Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes.  And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.      A life that is, like any other, unlike any other. 3 comments|post comment

[25 Jul 2008|12:56am] literaryquotes [yourbitterhero] "What is best in life?" "To crush your enemies see them driven before you and to hear the lamentations of women shit I fucked it ask me again." "What is best in life?" "To hear birds in the morning or you wake up and it's raining and the rain on the window going pitter-patter when it's cloudy and dark and your head's like a brick and you don't wanna move so you wait so you pull up the covers not this sounds way too gay I gotta start over I hate my voice ask me again." "What is best in life?" "To be at the movies at the East-Towne 5 and you're holding her hand and you feel her blood going through her hand up into your body and the planets are crashing the world is dying but none of it matters the sound of her body it's humming the ions in the weird darkness her beauty could turn you to stone and you know without knowing that you are alive and what it means to be dead and you wanna go way out further than you've ever gone before but everything's gone or slipping away and holding on to love is like hugging fog I'm falling to pieces ask me again." "What is best in life?" "A bright white moon hovering over the swamp and the fireflies at the window all spelling your name and lighting the way to no fuck wait." "What is best in life?" "The longing the waiting the mystery the silence." Bryan Charles, Grab Onto Me Tightly As If I Knew The Way 12 comments|post comment

Kate Ross: Cut to the Quick [24 Jul 2008|09:34pm] literaryquotes [gornishka] Dipper shot a shrewd glance at him. There had to be more to the story than that. You did not ask a cove to be a groomsman at your wedding in return for his chucking you out of a gambling house. But if Mr Kestrel had done something handsome, there would be no getting him to talk about it. He fell to polishing the buttons on Julian's coat. "A lot of the swell mob goes to weddings," he reminisced. "If there's a big crowd and you got the right kind of duds, you can mingle with the guests, and nobody'll ever know you wasn't invited. They're bad places to try and lift any wipes, on account of all the blubbering that goes on, everybody's always using theirs. Tickets is easy to get, though--nobody's thinking about what time it is. I never had the heart to work a wedding, meself. When people is as happy as that, how can you queer it for 'em by filing their clys? I ask you, sir." "With sensibilities like yours, I often wonder how you ever managed to steal anything at all." "I picked and chose me mark, sir, when I could afford to. Gentry coves like you, sir, as looked as if they wouldn't miss a few quid here and there." "You can't judge a man's finances by his clothes. Some of the heaviest swells in London have some of the lightest pocketbooks." "Oh, yes, I know that now, sir." "Since you came to work for me, you mean," said Julian, amused. **** "If everyone who died with unpunished sins on his conscience came back as a ghost, the living would be crowded out of England." "You're cynical. I thought you would be. Can you sneer?" "With terrifying effect." "Oh, do it, please! I want to see it!" "I'm afraid you're much too young to withstand it. I should be accused of stunting your growth--perhaps even sending you into a decline." "I wouldn't go into a decline. I'm robust. My governess says so. But, come along, I mustn't make you late to dinner." **** "Time to wake up, sir," Dipper ventured. "What time is it?" came a sepulchral voice from under the bedclothes. "Seven o'clock, sir." "Oh, my God." Julian dragged himself out from under the covers. "Don't--" he began, but Dipper was already parting the window curtains. Julian dove under the sheet again to block out the light. "It's appalling," he groaned, "simply appalling, to think that anyone was ever so benighted as to worship the sun. Dipper, if I ever tell I mean to have a house in the country, immerse me in cold baths and singe me with mustard plasters till my sanity returns." Dipper was glad to find him in such a tractable mood. When Mr Kestrel was really out of temper, he did not mock or complain, but went about in a tautly strung silence more disturbing than any show of rage. 2 comments|post comment

Daniel Hales | Licorice [24 Jul 2008|09:20pm] theysaid [dollpaper] If it's been over ten years since you last tried black licorice, you may now love it. If you come across a bus stop in mid-December someone may have written i heart you with their finger on the window's condensation. It may be fresh enough you can tell where she pressed her forefinger down hardest and whether or not she wore gloves. It may be that what you think is love Is no more so than a clump of pink insulation hanging strangely in a trashed storefront is a freshly butchered ham. If you sleep like a manger scene boxed up in the attic for half a century you may be in love, have some rare form of bipolar, or both, plus really thirsty. There is an explanation for the river's freezing only at the mouth of its tributary, translucent necklace of ice. It may be you are actually as alone as you feel, that it will only exponentiate. That this is what scared you so much in the darkness. 1 comment|post comment

Welcome to Hiroshima | Mary Jo Salter [24 Jul 2008|07:26pm] theysaid [somethinghead] is what you first see, stepping off the train: a billboard brought to you in living English by Toshiba Electric. While a channel silent in the TV of the brain projects those flickering re-runs of a cloud that brims its risen columnful like beer and, spilling over, hangs its foamy head, you feel a thirst for history: what year it started to be safe to breathe the air, and when to drink the blood and scum afloat on the Ohta River. But no, the water's clear, they pour it for your morning cup of tea in one of the countless sunny coffee shops whose plastic dioramas advertise mutations of cuisine behind the glass: a pancake sandwich; a pizza someone tops with a maraschino cherry. Passing by the Peace Park's floral hypocenter (where how bravely, or with what mistaken cheer, humanity erased its own erasure), you enter the memorial museum and through more glass are served, as on a dish of blistered grass, three mannequins. Like gloves a mother clips to coatsleeves, strings of flesh hang from their fingertips; or as if tied to recall a duty for us, Reverence the dead whose mourners too shall soon be dead, but all commemoration's swallowed up in questions of bad taste, how re-created horror mocks the grim original, and thinking at last They should have left it all you stop. This is the wristwatch of a child. Jammed on the moment's impact, resolute to communicate some message, although mute, it gestures with its hands at eight-fifteen and eight-fifteen and eight-fifteen again while tables of statistics on the wall update the news by calling on a roll of tape, death gummed on death, and in the case adjacent, an exhibit under glass is glass itself: a shard the bomb slammed in a woman's arm at eight-fifteen, but some three decades on—as if to make it plain hope's only as renewable as pain, and as if all the unsung debasements of the past may one day come rising to the surface once again— worked its filthy way out like a tongue. 1 comment|post comment

I wish my life were this interesting--if I knew it could be, I would've been a cop. [24 Jul 2008|07:16pm] literaryquotes [jacked_sparrow] [ mood | amused ] [ music | No Such Thing - John Mayer ] Liska stormed into the cubicle, her face pinched with temper, cheeks pink with cold. Kovac watched her with dread because he knew the look and what it meant for the quality of his day. Still, he didn't move as she bore down on him. She slugged his left upper arm as hard as she could. It was like being hit with a ball peen hammer. 'Ouch!' 'That was for ditching me last night,' she announced. 'I waited for you, and because I waited for you, Leonard cornered me and gave me the third degree about the Nixon assault and how Jamal Jackson couldn't be tied to it in any ways. Now he's got it in his head that Jackson can somehow claim false arrest and use it in his suit against the department.' 'What suit?' he asked, rubbing the sore spot. 'The suit Jackson's threatening. Brutality. Against me.' Kovac rolled his eyes. 'Oh, for Christ's sake. We've got the video of him beating me. Let him try to sue. If Leonard thinks Jackson has a case, he's got his head so far up his ass, we should call the people at Guinness. It's gotta be some kind of record.' 'I know,' Liska said, calming. She tossed her purse in a deep desk drawer and dropped her briefcase in her chair. 'I'm sorry I belted you. I had a rotten night. [My ex] came by. I didn't get much sleep.' 'Oh, jeez. I'm not gonna have to hear about sex, am I?' Liska's face went dark again, and she lunged across the cubicle and popped him a second time in exactly the same spot. 'Ouch!' Elwood stuck his huge head around the side of the half-wall. 'Do I need to call the police?' 'Why?' Liska demanded, shrugging out of her coat. 'Is being a knothead a crime now?' Kovac rubbed his arm. 'I guess I said the wrong thing.' 'Again,' Elwood added. 'Did she do that to your nose?' Kovac tried to catch his reflection in the dark screen of his computer monitor, though he already knew how it looked: puffy and red and lumpy as an old drunk's. At least it wasn't broken for the umpteenth time. 'Physical abuse of men by women,' Elwood said. 'One of society's great taboos. Victim Services can probably hook you up with a support club, Sam. Should I call Kate Conlan?' Kovac threw a pen at him. 'Why don't you go take a flying leap?' Dust to Dust, Tami Hoag 4 comments|post comment

[24 Jul 2008|06:29pm] literaryquotes [aintbovvered] In a way, her strangeness, her naïveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance or strings; had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yarned for. And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous. - Toni Morrison, Sula 3 comments|post comment

[24 Jul 2008|03:47pm] theysaid [iwillshowyouego] By the way, did you guys know that Jason Flatowicz played trombone on two Bright Eyes records? True! 17 comments|post comment

[24 Jul 2008|04:25pm] literaryquotes [felineinstincts] [ mood | excited ] Yet now and then in some overwhelming tragedy evil and good are so strangely mixed that these selfish and self-centered people are forced to pause in their restless pursuit of their own affairs, and their hearts are momentarily touched; but the impression made on them is fleeting, it vanishes as quickly as a delicious fruit melts in the mouth. Old Goriot, Balzac (translated by Marion Ayton Crawford) 1 comment|post comment

[24 Jul 2008|01:13pm] literaryquotes [ohbrilliantwhit] "Love is our response to our highest values." Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged 4 comments|post comment

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald [24 Jul 2008|01:08pm] literaryquotes [johneekemper] She had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it been she who had "dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners--now conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end. post comment

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