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Books I Fell in Love with This Year
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Some days lately things made sense, but mostly they did not.
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Random Cool Websites | October 2015
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You Write Many Poems about Death by Charles Bukowski
and remember this:
the page you are looking at
now,
I once typed the words
with care
with you in mind
under a yellow
light
with the radio
on.
Ruby Thewes
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Do not seek the because – in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions. – Anaïs Nin quotes on love, from Henry And June
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Variations on the Word Sleep
“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.” – Margaret Atwood
Frida Kahlo Quotes & Bio
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Alone With Everybody by Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski’s poem Alone With Everybody. “..we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.
nobody ever finds
the one.”
About
My name is Jessie & this is my blog. I live just outside of Kansas City. I rant about all kinds of things, like design, books, art, poetry, music, true crime & much more.
My name is Jessie & this is my blog.
I live just outside of Kansas City.
I rant about all kinds of things, like design, books, art, poetry, music, true crime & much more.
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
— Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost
Plants did not merely grow tall; they grew wide, curious about their surroundings, eager to seek nourishment from anywhere they could get it. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes I had to prune them back or watch a branch snap and wilt. My garden was a patchwork of failures and successes. I loved it.
— Loretta Nyhan, Digging In
She likes the idea of being a dog...She can run free if she wants. She can be a body and instinct and urge. She can be hunger and rage, thirst and fear, nothing more.
“I hate a thing like death,” Augustus said. “Well, everybody hates it, I expect,” Call said. “One reason I hate it is because it don’t leave you no time to finish conversations,” Gus said.
— Larry McMurtry, Comanche Moon
If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?
— Miranda July, The First Bad Man
She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire.
— Charles Bukowski, An Almost Made Up Poem
Her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
What lies inside a cage of flames? The truth, the heart, but burned up before you can see it. Only traces remain in the ashes, a pattern you guess at or invent, an intangible thing that might leave a mark, but could just as easily blow away.
— Rene Steinke, The Fires
We must not fear daylight just because it almost always illuminates a miserable world.
— René Magritte
Judith looked all wrong. Her hair was pulled back tightly; she was wearing some cheap polka-dotted dress she'd bought at a thrift shop. Our meeting was all full of false starts. What's going on at school? How is your painting? What did you do over spring break? What music are you listening to? Then it got into harder stuff. I took her hands. I grabbed at them greedily and held them in my lap. Why wasn't I good enough? I asked. Why couldn't I be closer to her than I was? What was I doing wrong? Why was I so bad at human commerce when it was the thing I wanted more than anything?
— Rick Moody, The Brightest Ring of Angels Around Heaven
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
— George Eliot
Love? Be it man. Be it woman.
It must be a wave you want to glide in on,
give your body to it, give your laugh to it,
give, when the gravelly sand takes you,
your tears to the land. To love another is something
like prayer and can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.
— Abraham Lincoln
“If I were to break my whiskey jug I expect I could glue it so it would look like a fine jug,” Augustus replied. “But it would still be leaky and let the whiskey run out. That’s the way it is with her, Woodrow. They might get her back in church and sing hymns at her till she stops screaming them screams. But she’ll always be leaky. She won’t never be right.”
— Larry McMurtry, Comanche Moon
“You're better off believing in God they'd warn you, just in case. Because you'd hate to arrive at the gates of heaven a nonbeliever and find out the Christians had been right all along. It was a pretty ingenious line of thinking. It almost made me want to go to church. Not enough to actually go, but still.”
— Drew Magary, The Postmortal
Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
“Great things grow from imperfect roots,” said the Devil.
We are the worst kind of vermin, destroying our planet, starving our fellow man.
— Agustina Bazterrica, Tender Is the Flesh
If writing wasn’t painful, O’Connor says, it would not be worth doing.
— Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
Behind every beautiful thing, there's some kind of pain.
— Bob Dylan
I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naïve or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.
— Anaïs Nin
When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That's relativity.
— Albert Einstein
Anyone who thinks he’s too small to make a difference has never been bit by a mosquito.
Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.
— Alfred Hitchcock
“Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong. Like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but can’t, it’s like we’re afraid we’ll be punished for it. So we hide. We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it. The thing we most don’t want has a way of landing right on top of us. That badger medicine’s the only thing that stands a chance at helping. You gotta learn how to stay down there. Way deep down inside yourself, unafraid.”
What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
— Robert H. Schuller
I turned to face grief, but realized it was just love in a heavy coat.
— Shannon Barry
This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.
— George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle
I imagined my hate as a flame racing along the dirt road until it licked at their door.
— Anna North, Outlawed
“Men were always putting their coats around my shoulders. They mark their territory that way. It’s better to freeze to death.”
— Lisa Taddeo, Animal
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
— Lao Tzu
I tasted disappointment like metal in my mouth.
— Anna North, Outlawed
I miss her all the time. I know in my head that she has gone. The only difference is that I am getting used to the pain. It's like discovering a great hole in the ground. To begin with, you forget it's there and keep falling in. After a while, it's still there, but you learn to walk round it.
— Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
There is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
— Joyce Carol Oates, Rape: A Love Story
She felt heightened in her own eyes, while knowing this sensation was not different from drunkenness, and that it would vanish like the ecstasies of drink, leaving her the next day even more shaky, even weaker at the core, deflated, possessing nothing within herself.
— Anaïs Nin, A Spy in the House of Love
I paint every day. Sometimes I hate painting, but I keep at it, thinking always that before I croak I'll really learn how to do it – maybe as well as some of the old painters.
— Thomas Hart Benton
Once my heart was filled with the love of a girl,
I held her close but she faded in the night,
like a poem i meant to write...
— Simon & Garfunkel, Leaves That Are Green
A man never is happy, but spends his whole life in striving after something which he thinks will make him so; he seldom attains his goal, and when he does, it is only to be disappointed; he is mostly shipwrecked in the end, and comes into harbor with masts and rigging gone. And then, it is all one whether he has been happy or miserable; for his life was never anything more than a present moment always vanishing; and now it is over.
— Arthur Schopenhauer
The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?
— Bob Dylan
It used to be that when something went wrong, there was an adult you could call, but now I was that adult.
Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Patience will be rewarded, the garden reminded me.
— Loretta Nyhan, Digging In
Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.
— William Gibson
They were the eyes of a happy woman, a woman around whom storms might blow without ever ruffling the serene core of her being.