“I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose) someone will try to make you feel lousy about it.”
Stephen King, On Writing (via nickmiller)
May 12
“As long as there’s such a thing as time, everybody’s damaged in the end, changed into something else. It always happens, sooner or later.”
Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore (via rabbrakha)
May 11
“
I.
When I was trying to quit smoking
and we drank white wine from Mason jars,
you called my freckles cocoa powder
and I called your green eyes
celery.
II.
I am learning how to be a grown-up
who pays bills, cooks her own meals,
and doesn’t cry at words like
I think I just want to be friends.
III.
The truth is this:
Love is an organic thing.
It rots and softens.
All That’s Left To Tell, Clementine von Radics (via clementinevonradics)
May 11
“Going through a drawer I found the submissions/applications log I’ve kept off and on over the years. Just in case you think it’s all been roses I’d like to report that Yaddo rejected me (as recently as 2011). McDowell rejected me. Hedgebrook rejected me twice. The Georgia Review rejected me and Ploughshares rejected me and Tin House rejected me, as did about twenty other journals and magazines. Both The Sun and The Missouri Review rejected me before I appeared in their pages. Literary Arts declined to give me a fellowship three times before I won one. I’ve applied for an NEA five times and it’s always been a no. Harper’s magazine never even bothered to reply. I say it all the time but I’ll say it again: keep on writing. Never give up. Rejection is part of a writer’s life. Then, now, always.”
May 11
“I always endowed madness with a sacred, poetic value, a mystical value. It seemed to me to be a denial of ordinary life, an effort to transcend it, expand, to go far before the limitations of the human condition.”
Anaïs Nin, The Diary Of Anaïs Nin Volume I 1931-1934 (via oh-to-be-a-work-of-art)
May 10
“Goodbye, said the fox. And now here is my secret, a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince (via likeafieldmouse)
May 10
“We seemed to share certain ideas about what happens in childhood, when you have to place yourself under the sign of your own name, your face, your voice, your outward reality. When you become a fixed position, a thing to others and to yourself. There were times, I told him, at the age of five, six, seven, when it was a shock to me that I was trapped in my own body. Suddenly I would feel locked into an identity, trapped inside myself, as if the container of my person were some kind of terrible mistake. My own voice and arms, my name, seemed wrong. As if I were a dispersed set of nodes that had been falsely organized into a form, and I was living in a nightmare, forced to see from out of this limited and unreal “me.”
The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner (via kelsfjord)
May 10
