compiling all my sticky notes

kingdom of crooked mirrors
the suicide brothers


Remember, people will judge you by your actions, not your intentions. You may have a heart of gold — but so does a hard-boiled egg."
Unknown

“ Don’t let us forget that the causes of human actions are usually immeasurably more complex and varied than our subsequent explanations of them.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot


"I thought: This is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without."
John Green, Looking for Alaska

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.


“ To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."
Bessie Anderson Stanley


“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”
—    F. Scott Fitzgerald


I can’t sleep at night because I feel that there is so much to do and fix and change in the world, and I wonder every day if I am making a difference and if I will ever express the greatness within me, or if I will remain forever paralyzed by muddled madness inside my head. I’ve wept on every birthday I’ve ever had because life is huge and fleeting and I hate certain people and certain shoes and I feel that life is terribly unfair and sometimes beautiful and wonderful and extraordinary but also numbing and horrifying and insurmountable and I hate myself a lot of the time. The rest of the time I adore myself and I adore my life in this city and in this world we live in. This huge and wondrous, bewildering, brilliant, horrible world.


becoming more a fan of long term goals....

socks with marie ann shoes, shorts and tights, big cardigan. scarf around buttonup collar

loafers red lipstick, big braid!



"Who knows what you mean to me now? You’re like the moon - always there, always on my mind. And you’re so damn beautiful. But maybe, you’re just a big rock floating in space. Maybe you’re not that mystical. Maybe you’re nothing, but dust. Maybe not the magic kind. Maybe. And maybe I have no fucking clue where I am going with this, and I just need to sort it out. But the image of your eyes clouds my own vision of where I stand and where I am heading. And I am just lost."
Unknown


an enterprise destined to dull the shine


"Take my hands,” she said. I took them. She squeezed. And her doing that, making that simple gesture, offered me more intimacy than I’d felt in… I don’t even know how long. Never, maybe. It’s hard to explain, my hands in hers. It wasn’t really sexual- had nothing to do with the semen I’d split watching that hanging light rock and sway above my head. But… It wasn’t completely non sexual, either. Like I said, I don’t know how to describe it, except to say it was, what? powerful, i guess. hopeful."
The hour I First Believed by Wally Lamb


"I have a simple philosophy: Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches."
Alice Roosevelt Longworth

“ I am the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Chesire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phoney, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party some place or some picnic in the park, the one who looks to very vibrant and you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with everyday that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible, getting covered over more thickly and darkness, coats and coats of darkness that are going to suffocate me in the sweltering heat of the summer that I can’t even see anymore, even though I can feel it burn."
prozac nation


“It’s very important to experience the complete negation of yourself which brings you to the other side of nothing. You go to the other side of nothing and you are held by the hand of the absolute. You see yourself as the absolute so you have no more insistence of self. You can speak of the self as no self when you sit in the absolute. Your sitting still is like a person who just shot an arrow. A moment later the result is there. What you know, the only thing you know is the sense that the arrow is moving all right. It has left your realm but you sense it is running well. The stillness in sitting is like that. You flip to the other side of nothing, where you discover everyone is waiting for you already.”
— Kobun Chino


SAUDADE
"once more, with feeling"
"if you don't light my fire, then don't come around"


i want to re-learn everything i once knew, every skill i once mastered and then lost to lack of use. i want to remember how load film, how to sew, how to drive a stick-shift, how to tell the temperature from cricket chirps. everything i knew about in second grade, about dinosaurs and types of clouds and the pilgrims and volcanoes, i want that knowledge back. i want back the memories caught up in photographs, i want the moments i thought i would never forget. every disposable camera entrusted to amateur hands, every memory of class field trips and playdates and recesses spent playing hopscotch and whispering secrets. i want to remember lyrics to songs i used to sing at the top of my lungs, to remember names and faces of friends who moved away, to reconnect with everyone i ever loved. i want back everything i’ve ever lost. everything i’ve ever known. everything i’ve needed.


प्रकाश के साथ मेरी आग आपका


"My point is, there are a lot of people in the world. No one ever sees everything the same way you do; it just doesn’t happen. So when you find one person who gets a couple of things, especially if they’re important ones, you might as well hold on to them."


Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, it wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.
— Jonathan Safran Foer


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http://youarebonbon.tumblr.com/
http://razzledazzlerose.tumblr.com/
http://suzywire.tumblr.com/
http://twosuns.tumblr.com/


here is the deepest secret nobody knows: (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart: i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
-ee cummings


I remember, in the eighties, when crack first hit the scene, hearing all kinds of horror stories about how if you smoked it even once, the memory of its unbelievable high would live on in your system forever, and you would thus never again be able to be content without it. I have no idea if this is true, but I will admit that it scared me off the drug. In the years since, I have sometimes found myself wondering if the same principle applies in other realms— if seeing a particularly astonishing shade of blue, for example, or letting a particularly potent person inside you, could alter you irrevocably, just ot have seen or felt it. In which case, how does one know when, or how, to refuse? How to recover? Bluets, Maggie Nelson

"Time is lost on me. It always has been. To me, the most sensible thing about time is that the clock is a perfect circle. I keep coming back here; back to this place, but on a different day and with a different set of eyes. I read an old journal this morning. Nearly by accident, but not exactly. It had been lying there in my closet waiting for a home after a recent unpacking. Before I retired it to the drawer where I retire things, I gave it one last look. A page from another life. Same person, different day, different set of eyes, lighter pressure on the pen. A page full of certainty and also full of questions. It’s always strange to read the things you’ve hoped for in the past because by now those hopes may be spoken for or gone, transformed or altogether forgotten. Like time, hope can be so senseless. It can carry us up mountains or lie us in the quicksand. But like time, hope is unstoppable, inevitable, and blind. Sometimes we travel fast, hurdling towards the unknown, sometimes the unknown comes hurdling towards us while we watch time standing still."
— Andrew McMahon



“One soul passes through the other, frail as smoke
And utterly ignorant of the way it took.”
Sylvia Plath

I remember one morning getting up at dawn. There was such a sense of possibility. You know that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself that this is the beginning of happiness… this is where it starts and of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me that it wasn’t the beginning… it was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.
— The Hours (2002)

An old man said to his grandchildren, ‘Inside everyone are two fighting wolves. One wolf is generous and kind, but the other is deceitful and unkind.’ One of the children asked his grandfather, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man replied, ‘The one you feed.
- Native American proverb

F. Scott Fitzgerald
I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between
very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; 
I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted
and knew I would never be so happy again.


"Secrets are my currency: I deal in them for a living. The secrets of desire, of what people really want, and of what they fear the most. The secrets of why love is difficult, sex complicated, living painful and death so close and yet placed far away. Why are pleasure and punishment closely related? How do our bodies speak? Why do we make ourselves ill? Why do you want to fail? Why is pleasure hard to bear?"


"They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you, their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because, you see gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? - - Carpe - - hear it? - - Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary."
Dead Poets Society

“You are not your body. You are not your emotions. You have emotions. You have thoughts as you have eggs for breakfast, but you are not the eggs, and you are not your emotions. You are as independent of your thoughts and emotions as you are of the bacon and eggs. You use the bacon and eggs in your physical composition, and you use your thoughts and emotions in your mental composition. Surely you do not identify with a piece of bacon? Then do not identify with your thoughts and emotions. When you set up barriers and doors, then you enclose emotions within you … as if you stored up tons of bacon in your refrigerator and then wondered why there was room for nothing else.”
— Jane Roberts, “The Seth Material”


"What is my perfect crime? I break into Tiffany's at midnight. Do I go for the vault? No, I go for the chandelier. It's priceless. As I'm taking it down, a woman catches me. She tells me to stop. It's her father's business. She's Tiffany. I say no. We make love all night. In the morning the cops come and I escape in one of their uniforms. I tell her to meet me in Mexico but I go to Canada. I don't trust her. Besides, I like the cold. Thirty years later, I get a postcard. I have a son and he's the chief of police. This is where the story gets interesting: I tell Tiffany to meet me in Paris, by the Trocadero. She's been waiting for me all these years; she's never taken another lover. I don't care, I don't show up. I go to Berlin. That's where I stashed the chandelier."


"Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. And intelligent, sensitive person is the exception, the very great exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you’ll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want."
— White Oleander



On a cool day where horizon stretched out beyond the sea, so much further than we could perceive, we stood together, immobile like statues overlooking a deep valley, where we made promises in whispers, alone on a forgotten beach, miles from any road, and any other human soul. We told ourselves that we’d never let go, and that we’d always remember kissing for the first ever time. Her body, much like that afternoon was brilliant and forgiving, and on that day, the sand was cool beneath our feet.
“I’m happy,” I said, as I reached for her hand, and our fingers interlocked.
“We’re happy,” Was her reply.
Later, as the sun set, we wrote our names in the sand, and as the earth turned us round the sun we were not aware of this fact. Only that the tide was coming in, and our names were washing out. That’s how I choose to remember her — us. It’s as if the tide that day took us both together down to the depths, and in the sea, is where we’ll always have each other.


It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking: How did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue. And maybe we can actually never have it, no matter what. How did he know that?
— ‘The Pursuit Of Happiness’ (2006)


I thought for a second that around the bend of the road there would be light and clarity and you’d be there (…) I just had a moment where I thought something like that is possible, that we would turn around a bend on the road and there would be an explanation, and an end, and we would say ‘Of course, of course, it was leading up to this all the while. ’ Something like that you know? All I ever wanted was to know what to do (…) I’ve been paralyzed by the quiet, and for a moment something spoke to me, and we came here, and intermittently there were answers. intermittently there was a chorus and they sang to us and pointing, and were watching and approving but just as often, there was silence, and we stood blinking under the sun, or under the black sky, and we had to think of what to do next.
— Dave Eggers, ‘You Should Know Our Velocity’


gregory alan isakov-master and a hound

people always think that happiness is a faraway thing,” thought Francie, “something complicated and hard to get. Yet, what little things can make it up; a place of shelter when it rains - a cup of strong hot coffee when you’re blue; for a man, a cigarette for contentment; a book to read when you’re alone - just to be with someone you love. Those things make happiness.
— Betty Smith, ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’

"Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd little waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like."
— Lemony Snicket

"sensual pleasures still occurred without the noisy apparatus of memory at once stealing them from the present—the infinite present of animals and children—and photostamping them on index cards to be cataloged, reviewed, summarized in typed syntax, and (most devastatingly) immediately compared to all that has been and all that will be. One scarcely witnesses the present before it is drowned out by the caterwauling of machine pistons, obscured by the soot from memorial combustion: it powers the mind, it clouds the sky.”

"Don’t you get it? She’s the house! She’s the plain white shutters, the sparkling glass windows, and the perfect white picket fence. She’s the ordinary stuff. But you… you’re the red door. And when people come by, yeah, sure, they see the house. But for some reason, they always end up looking at the door. It’s always in the corner of their eye. You can’t ignore a red door. And the house is nice, hell, the house is perfect. But then there’s that door. it’s almost painful to look at. You’re the door."
Chuck Palahnuik, Diary

"I never felt open in any way. I would never impulsively ring people and assume that they’d want to see me, or just go ‘round. I always had to sit down and think very hard before I knocked on anybody’s door. And consequently, I never really knocked."
Morrissey

"I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be - and then fight so hard for it every day that the lie becomes the truth."
— Lady Gaga

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
Jack Kerouac

"At least I carpe’d that one diem."
Paper Towns, John Green


One of my philosophy professors lectured wildly about love once, yelling: “When you’re in love with someone, that person is the lighthouse of your universe.” (I scrawled it inside Science and Poetry in pencil - lighthouse of your universe - as if I would ever forget that phrase.) He was a delightful caricature of his position. I could swear he literally tore his hair out while howling at us. He went on, “Nothing means as much without that person.” One of the men in the class repeated, incredulous, half-laughing “so you’re saying you can’t enjoy, like, a vacation, without someone if you’re really in love with them?” “Of course not.” the professor replied. “Not completely. You recognize beauty, but beauty means less if they don’t witness it with you. Beauty is less. You see something sublime and your first thought is that they should be there with you. It’s not as good without them. They illuminate. They make everything more.
— Author Unknown

"i like to see people reunited, maybe that’s a silly thing, but what can i say, i like to see people run to each other, i like the kissing and the crying, i like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can’t tell fast enough, the ears that aren’t big enough, the eyes that can’t take in all of the change, i like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone, i sit on the side with a coffee and write in my daybook, i examine the flight schedules that i’ve already memorized, i observe, i write, i try not to remember the life that i didn’t want to lose but lost and have to remember, being here fills my heart with so much joy, even if the joy isn’t mine, and at the end of the day i fill the suitcase with old news."
jonathan safran foe

See I don’t think you’ve ever been treated. You’ve been lusted after, chased, given ultimatums, pinched, poked, prodded and partitioned. But, you’ve never been treated, taken out, treasured, toppled with flowers that flow over you while you sit in a chair where you’re comfortable, and content and I don’t know that you’ve been held and honored and hoped for. You’ve never been someone’s dream. You’ve had your pick, you’ve parties, playacted, and put off. But you’ve never been treated. Your fair white skin has never been touched like it deserves to be touched, that dare I say delicate skin deserved to be touch in such a sensual way that even Sophocles would do well to write you into a beautiful tragedy.
You’ve been trying, but have you ever been treated?

Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.
from The Lover by Marguerite Duras ☆

"“Sometimes people having breakdown problems can look very beautiful because they have that fragile something to the way they move or walk. They put on a mood that makes them more beautiful.”"
Andy Warhol

"I’m a far more flawed human being than you realize. My sickness is a lot worse than you think: it has deeper roots. And that’s why I want you to go on ahead of me if you can. Don’t wait for me. Sleep with other girls if you want to. Don’t let thoughts of me hold you back. Just do what you want to do. Otherwise, I might end up taking you with me, and that is the one thing I don’t want to do. I don’t want to interfere with your life. I don’t want to interfere with anybody’s life. Like I said before, I want you to come to see me every once in a while, and always remember me. That’s all I want."
Haruki Murakami


If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.

No one sees
the fuel that feeds you

"There’s one sad truth in life I’ve found, while journeying east and west - The only folks we really wound are those we love the best. We flatter those we scarcely know, we please the fleeting guest, and deal full many a thoughtless blow to those who love us best."
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

But, like ivy, we grow where there is room for us. She seemed to have room for me; she never turned away in the pauses that allow for turning away. She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling. Some people need a red carpet rolled out in front of them in order to walk into friendship. They can’t see the tiny outstretched hands all around them, everywhere, like leaves on tree

"Be stoic when necessary & write—you have seen a lot, felt deeply, & your problems are universal enough to be made meaningful—WRITE."
Plath, April 1956


When I was a girl my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog followed a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I cried over it … I spent my life learning to feel less.
— Jonathan Safran Foer, ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close’


It seems only yesterday that I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed.
— Billy Collins

"No matter how careful you are, there’s going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn’t experience it all. There’s that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should’ve been paying attention."

“I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals, but also (this is more painful to admit) because they don’t hold the same importance for each other.”
— Ignorance, by Milan Kundera

"In the last few days, you’ve made me feel alive. You made me feel beautiful and intelligent and wanted, and no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to tell you how much that’s meant to me."

"Maybe it’s because you’re one of those people that believes that sometimes, the most reckless thing you can do with your heart, is not being reckless with it."

Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust’
with a buzz in our ears we play endlessly

"i would face him, & say simply: i am sad that you are not strong, & do not swim & sail & ski, but you have a strong soul, & i will believe in you & make you invincible on this earth. yes, i have that power. most women do, to one degree or another."
cambridge notes // sylvia plath.

"And I thought that all those little kids are going to grow up someday. And all of those little kids are going to do the things that we do. And they will all kiss someone someday. But for now, sledding is enough. I think it would be great if sledding were always enough, but it isn’t."
— The Perks of Being a Wallflower

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are - underneath the year that makes you eleven. Like some days you might say something stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three. Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being eleven years old is.
—
Sandra Cisneros, ‘Eleven’


“God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.”

"Generally by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you’re real, you can’t be ugly, except to the people who don’t understand."