A Little treasure off South of Canal Street...
Friday, June 10, 2011
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Thursday, September 30, 2010
another flush of sticky notes
I love you better. I always have. This may be a bad thing to tell you, but it’s true. I love you better. Else why would I have given myself the trouble of hurting you?
John Steinbeck, from “East of Eden
You see that young lady in red? Over there? Go and talk to her. Have a passionate weekend during which both of you make love until you’re sore and bleeding. Then, without knowing why, refuse to see her again. She’ll phone you up, and hang around your house. When you ask her to leave you alone she’ll just cry and not say anything — look at you with hurt eyes and follow you around. Eventually this will make you so angry you’ll find yourself needing desperately to make her say something. To make her react. To hurt her. To get her eyes out of your mind. After that it will be just a matter of time.
— The Sandman: Brief Lives, Neil Gaiman
You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they’ve served their purpose. But you’ve got to learn to throw things away eventually.
— The Sandman: Dream Country, Neil Gaiman
I have this fear of being thrown away. Of feeling like I’m just not as important to other people as they are to me. That feeling leads me to hold on so tight to folks who don’t want to be held onto and then keep a slim grip on those who do want to be held.
— Bassey Ikpi
"The next time I wake up, I want it to be in a rabbit hole to the sound of you making coffee, with the warm, salty sea; its waves crashing over me."
Seabear
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
Overruled, George Bernard Shaw
“ One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy. Alain de Botton
It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
— Alice Walker
“ Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.
— The Invisibles, Grant Morrison.
“ I’m going to paraphrase Thoreau here…rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness…give me truth. Into the Wild, Jon Krakaeur
And there’s verbophobia, fear of words. Which must mean that it’s best not to speak, said Juan de Dios Martínez. There’s more to it than that, because words are everywhere, even in silence, which is never complete silence, is it?
— Roberto Bolaño, from 2666
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.
— Chuck Palahniuk
The girl in the mirror caught my eye briefly…It is an uncanny feeling, that rare occasion when one catches a glimpse of oneself in repose. An unguarded moment, stripped of artifice, when one forgets to fool even oneself.
The House at Riverton, Kate Morton
I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
“I say, you do have a heart!’
Sometimes,’ he replied. ‘When I have the time.”
Around the World in Eight Days, Jules Verne
I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink…
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
That is such crap. How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye.
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
"I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you."
Jeanette Winterson
"I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had."
Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)
…I feel sorry for anyone who can look at you and not see beauty and kindness and joy and life. Even if that person is you. So pity the man or woman who can stare you in the face and watch you hold your heart in your hand and still turn away. Pity them. They must blame the sunshine for pollen instead of thanking it for warmth. What a horrible way to live. I’ve been there. It is miserable. I will fight until there is blood and silence for my right to happiness and joy and laughter and enough tension to keep me motivated. And I have no problem, closing the gate and the door and the windows and the heart to anyone who keeps me from it. True fact.
— Bassey Ikpi
"And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long."
Sylvia Plath
"I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it."
Sylvia Plath
I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give -Sylvia Plath
Sometimes I wonder if I just faked our whole relationship…if he ever really did love me….if I ever really did know the feeling of how it felt to be loved and to love….maybe I just made the whole thing out to be more than it was. Because he’s with her now. He’s been with her for 4 months. and my dreams and hopes of love are suddenly shattered….because I know now that when I call out his name at night….he’s calling out hers….and there’s nothing in the world that hurts more….than knowing the only man I’ve ever loved….is out there loving someone else.
— JoAnne Golden
“ Anne Sexton sometimes seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language, but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that see so sharply they often want to close.
— Erica Jong
Memories will rust and erode into lists Of all that you gave me A blanket, some matches, this pain in my chest The best parts of lonely
— The Weakerthans
Some people I’ve loved with my whole heart. Some people I’ve had to push out of my mind. I have to be ok with both. I have to be ok with these people that cycle in and cycle out. I have to be ok with being cycled in and then cycled out. Hurtful as it may seem to feel like you don’t matter to someone that matters to you. You do matter. Trust the space between the silence.
— Bassey Ikpi
I want to burn, even if I break myself. I live only for ecstasy. Nothing else effects me. Small doses, moderate loves— all these leave me cold. I like extravagance, heat… sexuality which bursts the thermometer! I am neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous— lava, inflammable, unrestrained. I feel like a jungle animal who is escaping captivity.
“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
—
Ernest Hemingway
Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I’d fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, ‘So this is how it feels,’ and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else.
— The Sandman: The Wake, Neil Gaiman
He liked sex to be something that just happened, half in his head, half out of it. Something sudden and dirty and powerful.
— Mouse, Neil Gaiman
“There will be days when you’ll look at your hands and you’ll want to take something and smash every bone in them, because they’ll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can’t find that chance, and you can’t bear your living body because it has failed you somewhere.There will be days when a bus driver will snap at you as you enter a bus, and he’ll be only asking you for a dime, but that won’t be what you hear, you’ll hear that you’re nothing, that he’s laughing at you, that it’s written on your forehead, that thing they hate you for.”
—
Ayn Rand
John Steinbeck, from “East of Eden
You see that young lady in red? Over there? Go and talk to her. Have a passionate weekend during which both of you make love until you’re sore and bleeding. Then, without knowing why, refuse to see her again. She’ll phone you up, and hang around your house. When you ask her to leave you alone she’ll just cry and not say anything — look at you with hurt eyes and follow you around. Eventually this will make you so angry you’ll find yourself needing desperately to make her say something. To make her react. To hurt her. To get her eyes out of your mind. After that it will be just a matter of time.
— The Sandman: Brief Lives, Neil Gaiman
You people always hold onto old identities, old faces and masks, long after they’ve served their purpose. But you’ve got to learn to throw things away eventually.
— The Sandman: Dream Country, Neil Gaiman
I have this fear of being thrown away. Of feeling like I’m just not as important to other people as they are to me. That feeling leads me to hold on so tight to folks who don’t want to be held onto and then keep a slim grip on those who do want to be held.
— Bassey Ikpi
"The next time I wake up, I want it to be in a rabbit hole to the sound of you making coffee, with the warm, salty sea; its waves crashing over me."
Seabear
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
Overruled, George Bernard Shaw
“ One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy. Alain de Botton
It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
— Alice Walker
“ Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.
— The Invisibles, Grant Morrison.
“ I’m going to paraphrase Thoreau here…rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness…give me truth. Into the Wild, Jon Krakaeur
And there’s verbophobia, fear of words. Which must mean that it’s best not to speak, said Juan de Dios Martínez. There’s more to it than that, because words are everywhere, even in silence, which is never complete silence, is it?
— Roberto Bolaño, from 2666
Everything is a self-portrait. A diary. Your whole drug history’s in a strand of your hair. Your fingernails. The forensic details. The lining of your stomach is a document. The calluses on your hand tell all your secrets. Your teeth give you away. Your accent. The wrinkles around your mouth and eyes. Everything you do shows your hand.
— Chuck Palahniuk
The girl in the mirror caught my eye briefly…It is an uncanny feeling, that rare occasion when one catches a glimpse of oneself in repose. An unguarded moment, stripped of artifice, when one forgets to fool even oneself.
The House at Riverton, Kate Morton
I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling, but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around in it.
The Help, Kathryn Stockett
“I say, you do have a heart!’
Sometimes,’ he replied. ‘When I have the time.”
Around the World in Eight Days, Jules Verne
I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink…
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
That is such crap. How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional fuckwittage. Goodbye.
Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
"I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don’t have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you."
Jeanette Winterson
"I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had."
Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)
…I feel sorry for anyone who can look at you and not see beauty and kindness and joy and life. Even if that person is you. So pity the man or woman who can stare you in the face and watch you hold your heart in your hand and still turn away. Pity them. They must blame the sunshine for pollen instead of thanking it for warmth. What a horrible way to live. I’ve been there. It is miserable. I will fight until there is blood and silence for my right to happiness and joy and laughter and enough tension to keep me motivated. And I have no problem, closing the gate and the door and the windows and the heart to anyone who keeps me from it. True fact.
— Bassey Ikpi
"And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long."
Sylvia Plath
"I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it."
Sylvia Plath
I have never found anybody who could stand to accept the daily demonstrative love I feel in me, and give back as good as I give -Sylvia Plath
Sometimes I wonder if I just faked our whole relationship…if he ever really did love me….if I ever really did know the feeling of how it felt to be loved and to love….maybe I just made the whole thing out to be more than it was. Because he’s with her now. He’s been with her for 4 months. and my dreams and hopes of love are suddenly shattered….because I know now that when I call out his name at night….he’s calling out hers….and there’s nothing in the world that hurts more….than knowing the only man I’ve ever loved….is out there loving someone else.
— JoAnne Golden
“ Anne Sexton sometimes seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language, but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that see so sharply they often want to close.
— Erica Jong
Memories will rust and erode into lists Of all that you gave me A blanket, some matches, this pain in my chest The best parts of lonely
— The Weakerthans
Some people I’ve loved with my whole heart. Some people I’ve had to push out of my mind. I have to be ok with both. I have to be ok with these people that cycle in and cycle out. I have to be ok with being cycled in and then cycled out. Hurtful as it may seem to feel like you don’t matter to someone that matters to you. You do matter. Trust the space between the silence.
— Bassey Ikpi
I want to burn, even if I break myself. I live only for ecstasy. Nothing else effects me. Small doses, moderate loves— all these leave me cold. I like extravagance, heat… sexuality which bursts the thermometer! I am neurotic, perverted, destructive, fiery, dangerous— lava, inflammable, unrestrained. I feel like a jungle animal who is escaping captivity.
“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”
—
Ernest Hemingway
Whatever happened to me in my life, happened to me as a writer of plays. I’d fall in love, or fall in lust. And at the height of my passion, I would think, ‘So this is how it feels,’ and I would tie it up in pretty words. I watched my life as if it were happening to someone else.
— The Sandman: The Wake, Neil Gaiman
He liked sex to be something that just happened, half in his head, half out of it. Something sudden and dirty and powerful.
— Mouse, Neil Gaiman
“There will be days when you’ll look at your hands and you’ll want to take something and smash every bone in them, because they’ll be taunting you with what they could do, if you found a chance for them to do it, and you can’t find that chance, and you can’t bear your living body because it has failed you somewhere.There will be days when a bus driver will snap at you as you enter a bus, and he’ll be only asking you for a dime, but that won’t be what you hear, you’ll hear that you’re nothing, that he’s laughing at you, that it’s written on your forehead, that thing they hate you for.”
—
Ayn Rand
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
“Recently, I heard someone say that great literature was their religion. I know what they mean. There can be poetry and prose that capture states of being so transparently and unforgettably that any added theology or philosophy could only detract. Take “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Often, when I contemplate what the Buddhists call “dhukkha,” the Pali word for the suffering or, better, that unsatisfactory, incomplete, pining quality that is built in to existence, I think of that great self-made, driven American character Jay Gatsby, looking across Long Island Sound, at the green light on dock of his beautiful love, Daisy Buchanan. No matter what Gatsby has achieved or will ever achieve–and he has amassed great riches by hook or by crook–Daisy will always be unattainable. Poor Gatsby can’t ever see through the gorgeous veil of illusion. “The Great Gatsby” has been called The Great American Novel. I think of it as the Great American Sutta (in Pali, sutra in Sanskrit) on the suffering that comes from craving…”
— an excerpt from Tracy Cochran
— an excerpt from Tracy Cochran
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
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